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My OSX Mountain Lion will no longer atart up. After the logon screen it spins forever (the Apple logon is replaced by an error sign).

When I run in single user mode I get a "still waiting for root device" that repeats every few seconds.

I suspect the problem is with core storage. Although I have encrypted the osx partition, the system can't find it (from recovery):

diskutil corestorage list
No corestorage logical volume groups found.

fsck_cs will however report a corestorage: 

** Checking volume.
   Content Hint for disk0s2 is not Apple_CoreStorage
** disk0s2: Scan for Volume Headers
** disk0s2: Scan for Disk Labels
** Logical Volume Group D4B301AF-3633-418B-980D-4CADB2DA6B0B on 1 device
** disk0s2: Scan for Metadata Volume
** Logical Volume Group has a 16 MB Metadata Volume with double redundancy
** Start scanning metadata for a valid checkpoint
** Load and verify Segment Headers
** Load and verify Checkpoint Payload
** Load and verify Transaction Segment
** Load and verify Transaction Segment
** Incorporate 1 newer non-checkpoint transaction
** Load and verify Virtual Address Table
** Load and verify Segment Usage Table
** Load and verify Metadata Superblock
** Load and verify Logical Volumes B-Trees
** Logical Volume Group contains 1 Logical Volume
** Load and verify BE7E7CD3-AB97-45F3-AC3C-B4AE8D73E22F
** Load and verify C418ACC5-E2D4-4EDE-84D7-2366A261A08E
** Load and verify Freespace Summary
** Load and verify Block Accounting
** Newest transaction commit checkpoint is valid
** Load and verify Segment Cleaning
** The volume D4B301AF-3633-418B-980D-4CADB2DA6B0B appears to be OK.

Any ideas on how I can repair this?

Or at least mount it to get at a few files?

laktak
  • 3,198

1 Answers1

2

I was finally able to fix the problem:

  • boot into recovery
  • unmount all volumes (otherwise gpt will complain that the resource is busy)
  • use gpt to remove the partition (it had the HFS instead of the CoreStorage type)
  • also delete the partition from the MBR with fdisk (otherwise gpt will not allow you to add the partition).
  • finally use gpt to add the partition with the same values but as core storage (type 53746F72-6167-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC)

Afterwards diskutil cs list showed the volumes again - disk utility repair did the rest. No data lost :)

laktak
  • 3,198
  • Can you elaborate on how this worked? I have an image of a CoreStorage partition that I can't figure out how to recover. It was created using dd from a hard drive that was about to fail. The dd was run on the physical volume that underpinned the CoreStorage volume. – Matthew Strax-Haber Oct 02 '14 at 16:46
  • sorry, that was 2 years ago and about the only time I used that method. take a look at man gpt and man fdisk. – laktak Oct 02 '14 at 21:50