My main Macintosh HD partition just disappeared

[Tarek]

Hello there

I was trying to install Ubuntu Linux alongside Mac OS X by following a popular tutorial on the internet but I seem to have screwed things up when I tried to do it manually by choosing "Something Else" in the installation settings; the reason is because the installation could not detect that Mac OS X was actually installed and so things had to be done manually.

I originally shrunk the Macintosh HD partition and was going to use the free space for Ubuntu, but I don't remember exactly what went wrong but now I can no longer even see the Macintosh HD partition any longer (which seems to be called UNTITLED in Disk Utility). The problem is that I did not perform a backup as I thought the procedure was very simple and I had already done it on my PC earlier, but turns out I was dead wrong again. Now I seem to have lost my data and was wondering if there is anything I could do to make it work.

Whenever I try to create, delete, or modify a partition in Disk Utility, the operation just immediately fails. At first I thought it was because of FileVault so I turned it off from Terminal but then it just says 'operation failed'.

Any ideas are much appreciated.

UPDATE: I tried the following commands in Terminal in order to try and mount the partition to no avail.

sudo asr adjust --target /dev/disk0s2 --settype "Apple_HFS"

diskutil mount readOnly /dev/disk0s2

Terminal just says asr: Volume adjustment failed: Invalid argument.

 

[cradom]

If it is indeed wiped about the only thing you can do is boot to Recovery (Cmd-R or Option at boot) and reinstall the system.
Did you ever make an install USB stick? Would make things easier.
I'm Afraid your data is gone.

 

[Tarek]

Thank you for your reply, cradom. I'm currently attempting to make a bootable USB drive from my PC since I have an old backup of my MacBook which contains Mac OS X El Capitan. I'm using an application called TransMac in order to do so. I used the Internet Recovery option last night but I was unable to do just about anything in Disk Utility, and I'm guessing because Internet Recovery is technically running from within the hard drive? I am hoping I'll be able to wipe the whole hard drive and repartition it when installing Mac through USB.

 

[cradom]

Just make SURE it's bootable before you do anything. Not familiar with TransMac so be careful.

 

[harryb2448]

Won't work alas from yur PC. What version OS X was on the computer? Suggest you go into Recovery Mode and download the OS.