I’m going to have to start off this post with a little background story. Last night at approximately 8PM I lost all the data that was stored on my MacBook’s hard drive. That’s over 400GB of movies, TV shows, pictures, and music. I also lost the local copies of all of my websites. Lucky enough for me I work on all of my sites live with Coda, therefore nothing was completely lost.
How did I lose this, you ask? Well, on my MacBook Pro I had two partitions, one for Snow Leopard and the other for Windows 7. Yeah yeah I know, an Apple fanboy using Windows, but let me just mention that I use it for the sole purpose of gaming. Anyway, back on topic, I noticed that my Windows partition wasn’t mounting in Snow Leopard any more, so I went to try to diagnose the problem. I went into Windows and set the active partition to the Snow Leopard partition (I deduced this solution from my days of a hackintosher), though this did not work and actually did not let me boot into Snow Leopard OR Windows 7. I didn’t panic because I figured I could pop in the Windows 7 installation disc, open up a command line, and then set the Windows partition as the active partition. Little did I know that trying that would convert the whole drive to MBR, thus making both partitions unbootable and unmountable. I went through and tried to repair either of the partitions just so that I wouldn’t lose anything, but each repair procedure I tried ended in failure.
That’s when I just got pissed and frustrated and just decided to screw both installations and start from scratch. The only thing that I really REALLY wanted to save were my saved games for Oblivion. I was able to pop in the 7 install disc and grab the files off of the partition before I wiped everything. I mean, hey, I spent over 48 hours in that game. Anyway, I got everything reinstalled and kept thinking there had to be a better way to prevent this.