Very strange partition table: Missing a sector between Main and Recovery partition So I have been trying to get Windows 7 on my machine using no DVD or USB (I have only an ISO to work with). I used various combinations of Boot Camp, Toast Titanium, Virtualbox / VMWare, Disk Utility, and rEFIt to attempt this, and after realizing that nothing had worked and getting a DVD-RW, I set about putting everything back to normal, i.e:


Changing my MBR table back to a single EFI protective partition spanning the entire disk (apparently, Boot Camp magically did that for me)
Making my OS X partition fill my whole disk again (in the EFI table, using Disk Utility).


So now everything looks pretty much fine from the outside, but there's on detail that bothers me a little bit. Here's the output from diskutil list:

/dev/disk0
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *500.1 GB   disk0
   1:                        EFI                         209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS Macintosh HD            499.2 GB   disk0s2
   3:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD             650.0 MB   disk0s4


As you can see, I have no disk0s3 partition. My Recovery HD partition should be in disk0s3 and I should have no disk0s4. But I have no idea how this came about or how severe it is, and only the faintest idea how to fix it (deleting, making a new Recovery HD, not sure if that'll work)

As well, here is the output from rEFIt's Partition Inspector:

*** Report for internal hard disk ***

Current GPT partition table:
 #      Start LBA      End LBA  Type
 1             40       409639  EFI System (FAT)
 2         409640    975503591  Mac OS X HFS+
 3      975503592    976773127  Mac OS X Boot

Current MBR partition table:
 # A    Start LBA      End LBA  Type
 1              1    976773167  ee  EFI Protective

MBR contents:
 Boot Code: Unknown, but bootable

Partition at LBA 40:
 Boot Code: None (Non-system disk message)
 File System: FAT32
 Listed in GPT as partition 1, type EFI System (FAT)

Partition at LBA 409640:
 Boot Code: None
 File System: HFS Extended (HFS+)
 Listed in GPT as partition 2, type Mac OS X HFS+

Partition at LBA 975503592:
 Boot Code: None
 File System: HFS Extended (HFS+)
 Listed in GPT as partition 3, type Mac OS X Boot


Which confirms that my MBR table is in the right place, and also tells me that my disk0s2 and disk0s4 are indeed right next to each other, so there is no invisible partition in between.

Thanks for your help!

Matt
Rebooting the system reorganized the list on my mac