It appears that some people, after updating to Mavericks, are no longer able to boot from their BootCamp partition. The reports vary, some people update and don’t experience any problems, but some are finding that the entire partition has disappeared. There are a number of threads about this on Apple’s discussion pages. Here are a few:
- Mavericks altered BootCamp partition
- OSX Maverick… Updated Bootcamp Drivers?
- Bootcamp doesn´t works after mavericks*
*any misspellings are theirs, not mine
Due to the fact that I only run Windows natively on my laptop occasionally, I hadn’t even considered this. I had gone to the discussion groups to see if I needed to update something with the BootCamp Assistant first, and then found some of these horror stories (fitting for Halloween eh?). Luckily, no drivers appear to have changed in Mavericks, so in theory you should be able to boot right up into whatever flavor of Windows you have installed. My boot up of Windows went ok, although there was a long delay at first, but it seems to be working fine. Having perused a number of these discussion threads, it appears that the most common factor shared by people who had problems was that they had resized their BootCamp partition some time after it was initially created, and before upgrading to Mavericks. A couple of the symptoms of the problem may be:
- The partition may no longer show up in the Startup Disk control panel
- The partition no longer shows among the disks available to boot from when you boot your Mac with the Option key down
- Disk Utility show a big whopping blank spot in the space where your partition used to be. Really, nothing, just grey space.
Lest you loose hope, DON’T PANIC…yet. A number of the discussions, including the ones listed here, offer a number of suggestions to retrieve your partition and Windows installation. Most people seem to have had success with one of these, however, some of the solutions are a little in-depth and require the use of Terminal and some open-source software. Use discretion when employing these methods. The best thing you can do, naturally, is make sure you have a nice, recent backup of everything before updating to Mavericks. That way, you may not have to do a complete, arduous, reinstall of Windows.