Monday, January 2, 2017

Can't have 3 partitions on Macbook Pro 13'' Late 2011

The MBR for Windows partition was corrupted when I divided the disk into 3 partitions, two for Mac OS and Windows and one for data.

At first, I installed Windows 7 my Macbook Pro 13'' late 2011 and the problem i couldn't fix is the palmrest area was usually very warm; the heat is unbearable if you rest your hands on it for about half an hour or longer. I tried many ways such as installing Windows updates, using MacFan Control application, and setting the maximum processor power to 90%. But, the heat was still unbearable.

After that, I accidentally corrupted the file system on all hard drives when i tried to shrink a partition on Windows so I had to install it again but I installed Windows 8.1 this time. While setting up Windows, i got this error message "Windows cannot be installed on this disk. The selected disk has an MBR partition table. On EFI systems, Windows can only......". It's because disk of MBR style can't have many primary partitions. I'm not how many but my disk already had three. I followed this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pb6tECZP6WE fix but the whole hard drive has to be formatted again. At the installation screen, I pressed Shift + F10 then a command prompt opened and I typed the following commands.
> diskpart
> list disk
> select disk <number>
I had two disks, the hard drive of my machine and USB drive of Windows installation files. The zero number represented the hard drive of my machine.
> clean
The clean commands formatted the whole hard drive.
> convert gpt
> exit
You have to type exit command so that the change is saved.
It seemed like Windows 8 worked better on my Macbook Pro. The palmrest area was much cooler, almost like normal even though I have about 20 tabs of Chrome browser opening and I hadn't even tried the cooling methods i did on Windows 7.

I had three partitions for MacOS, Windows, and data (extFAT). Only Windows partition was bootable so i installed MacOS on another partition. After the installation completed, I couldn't boot into Windows anymore. The Windows partition had been corrupted. I don't know why but seemed like I couldn't have more than 2 primary partitions on the hard disk.

Then, I removed other partitions so i had only MacOS installed. I created another two partitions, NTFS and Mac Extended Journal (for data). Then, I installed Windows on the NTFS partition. The Windows file system didn't corrupt anymore. But, i couldn't see the partition of type Mac Extended Journal from within Windows; i could see only MacOS partition. In Drive Management, the Mac Extended Journal for storing data shown as unallocated space s i created a new partition on it using extFAT file format. Damn! I couldn't boot into Windows again. The master boot record corrupted again.

At last, I successfully solved the problem by reformatted the whole drive and created 3 partitions of types: Mac Extended Journal (for MacOS), NTFS (for Windows), NTFS (for data). The Windows partition didn't corrupted anymore and i could see all partitions from within Windows.



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