Shared partition between OSX and Windows 10 (using Bootcamp) Disappeared?
Longtime windows user giving OSX a go. My idea was to install Windows via BootCamp and have a shared partition that holds my Dropbox folder (to avoid having dropbox take twice the room on my SSD), music and some other media.
It wasn't a breeze to setup (this post helped me allot after my bootcamp disappeared when adding the shared partition in disk utility) but eventually I got it going. Today however after setting up Dropbox on Windows (not sure if coincidental) the shared partition disappeared and is not showing in either OS (I mean in Finder/File Explorer).
The Shared partition is the 250GB one and was formatted as ExFAT.
This is what Disk Utility is showing:
This is the output I am getting from GDisk:
GPT fdisk (gdisk) version 1.0.1
Warning: Devices opened with shared lock will not have their
partition table automatically reloaded!
Partition table scan:
MBR: protective
BSD: not present
APM: not present
GPT: present
Found valid GPT with protective MBR; using GPT.
Command (? for help): p
Disk /dev/disk0: 977105060 sectors, 465.9 GiB
Logical sector size: 512 bytes
Disk identifier (GUID): E17AF55E-F8EF-4DE3-9767-F7CCC3C37CDC
Partition table holds up to 128 entries
First usable sector is 34, last usable sector is 977105026
Partitions will be aligned on 8-sector boundaries
Total free space is 262281 sectors (128.1 MiB)
Number Start (sector) End (sector) Size Code Name
1 40 409639 200.0 MiB EF00 EFI System Partition
2 409640 292336615 139.2 GiB AF05 Untitled
3 292336616 293606151 619.9 MiB AB00 Recovery HD
4 293606152 781438975 232.6 GiB 0700 Windows_NTFS_Untitl...
5 781701120 977104895 93.2 GiB 0700 BOOTCAMP
Solution 1:
So after much research I managed to resolve the issue. Looks like ExFAT is susceptible to corruption, but you can actually repair it in terminal. In hindsight it looks like a better solution would have been to format the shared drive as NTFS and use Paragon NTFS to read/write to the share in OSX.
Solution
If you encounter a similar issue with ExFAT under OSX, the steps to solve it are as follows:
-
Find out your partition identifier in Terminal by running the command
diskutil list
-
run the following command to repair the disk (replace
disk0s4
with whatever your partition name is according to step 1)sudo fsck_exfat -d disk0s4
The disk will be scanned and repaired (you will be prompted whether you want to repair).
Sources:
exFAT partition got corrupted, but was easily fixed. How did this happen?
Repairing a Corrupted Mac OSX ExFAT Partition
List All Mounted Drives and their Partitions from the Terminal
Access SAME dropbox folder on MacOS and Windows in BOTH Parallels AND BootCamp?