As stated in previous posts my Laptop is set up with the Refit boot manager to use three operating systems.

After reinstalling GNU/Linux recently (to take a look at mint), refit would not boot anymore and show an error message about not finding the partition.

Trying to resync the GPT and MBR partion tables fails with „Analysis inconclusive. Partition will not be touched“. Also Windows would not start and instead show a message, that the bootloader files have been altered and one should try a repair with the recovery console 🙁

Luckily, after searching a bit, I found this post which helped me to manually fix the Linux/Windows partitions in the MBR table with help of Partition Inspector (comes with refit 0.14), Terminal, Diskutil, fdisk and Calculator. Thanks to Jon 🙂

What has happened ?

The MBR was messed up after an earlier upgrade of another partition to OS X 10.7 (Lion), that inserted an additional FAT32 partition in the MBR. This caused the other partitions to get renumbered, the partition type changed to „Basic Data“ instead of „NTFS“ (7) or „Linux“ (83) and since an MBR can only hold four entries: the last – now fifth – partition unreachable for Refit.

Strangely the other operating systems kept working fine for 5 months after the OS X upgrade and the problem only showed up now, when the linux boot loader was reinstalled.