When a package, in a .pkg
file, needs to be installed on a Mac OS X system, the package installer provided with the system is used. At some point in the installation of any package, it asks on which file system partition it should install the package. On my system, it used to show the partition on which Mac OS X is installed, which is called “Macintosh HD”, but it does not anymore due to reasons I am unaware of, and instead only shows the two recovery partitions both called “Recovery HD”; this effectively makes me unable to install anything using a package installer. Furthermore, the system partition is also absent from the choices available in the Mavericks installer, which means this problem also prevents me from upgrading my system from Mountain Lion to Mavericks.
I have told the disk utility to repair the hard drive, but it hasn’t found any problem. I have also wanted to repair the system partition, but it was absent from the list of partitions in the disk utility. I was later able to have it displayed by enabling the disk utility’s debug mode and although the repair option was grayed, I was able to run a verification that found no problem and to repair the permissions.
Furthermore, the “Partition” tab of the disk utility, when the hard drive is selected, claims the place where the system partition should be is actually 207.91 GB of free space. There are some other partitions I have previously used to run a Debian system, but I have since then erased them and they are now empty partitions.
Finally, I am unable to change the partition layout at all from the “Partition” tab of the disk utility when the hard drive is selected: every time I attempt to delete a partition or to apply a change, it tells me the change asked is too small and refuses to perform it.
My current system is Mac OS X 10.8.5 running on a Mac mini.
sudo gpt -v show -l /dev/disk0
? That's a fairly definitive statement about the state of your disk's GUID Partition Table (GPT). It sounds like your GPT got borked by Debian. Also, the output ofsudo fdisk /dev/disk0
would also be useful, to see what your Protective Master Boot Record (PMBR) says. On GPT disks (Intel-based Mac boot disks are GPT), GPT is authoritative, but there's also usually a "Protective MBR" to tell MBR-based tools that the whole disk is allocated, in hopes that such non-GPT-aware tools won't try to erase or repartition the drive./dev/disk0
bydisk0
for thegpt
command. Results and session log.-r
(read only) to thegpt
command to get it to work on a busy volume. Well, the good news is, your PMBR looks correct. Your GPT looks a bit messy, but possibly correct. I'd need to see the output of the samegpt
command, but without the-l
, so we can see if your ~193GiB partition is still marked with the HFS+ GUID, or if it's accidentally been marked with the GUID for a different partition type. Sosudo gpt -rv show disk0
.