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Weird Disk Utility Problems?

M

mrcr3nk

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Nov 21, 2011
7
0
Hi,

Bought my 15" MBP Late 2011 (High-end) last week.

I set up Bootcamp with 60gb of space. I read that the simplest way to add space to the Windows partition is by partitioning the main HFS drive and formatting it on Windows itself to NTFS. Boy, was I wrong.

After I partitioned my HFS+ drive, the Windows drive went missing during boot up. It showed on Disk Utility as unbootable. Reading that it might be a MBR problem, I ran the Windows repairer and executed /fixmbr and /fixboot. So now it appeared back as a Windows partition but it wouldn't boot, staying forever at the blinking cursor and a black screen when I selected it.

Deciding that the best way to solve it was to redo the whole thing, I used Boot Camp Assistant and removed the Windows partition entirely. When I tried to create a new one, it says there are it cannot as some files cannot be moved.

I tried to partition my HFS+ drive to force it to move the files but it says "file system cannot be verified". I did a repair of permissions and the disk itself as that was the solution offered by some of the threads here and found some errors. Repaired it in Recovery mode and tried to partition again.

This time round the error was "could not unmount disk".

What is going on with my HDD? Baffling! Now I am stuck and am not able to bootcamp at all. :eek:

Thoughts anyone?
 
D

dumb

macrumors member
Nov 1, 2009
85
1
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A405 Safari/7534.48.3)

I was in the exact same spot. ended up formatting Lion partition and did a clean lion install then did fixmbr for windows. Sanity restored. I consoled myself saying, eh wanted a clean lion anyways
 
johnhurley

johnhurley

macrumors 6502a
Aug 29, 2011
777
56
mrcr3nk said:
What is going on with my HDD? Baffling! Now I am stuck and am not able to bootcamp at all. :eek:
Click to expand...

The problem is when people start getting creative and mixing and matching different ways to setup bootcamp.

Each new version of bootcamp assistant and associated software on each different machine type has it's own rules and ways to do things.

Best advice at this point is to print out the bootcamp manual for your specific machine and bootcamp version and work from that setup.

If I were you I would get an external USB flash drive created using Lion Recovery Assistant. I would get a time machine backup of your Lion system.

The using the external flash drive take out your whole current hard drive ( erase it entirely ) then re-install your operating system from the flash drive. This will require a download from Apple and will take a while ( depending on how much bandwidth you have ).

Then do the migration assistant at the tail end and pick your time machine backup to recover from.

Then later start down the bootcamp path after reading the manual.

Make sure when you do the win 7 install to pick the bootcamp partition and then using advanced option on that install screen format it as NTFS. If you don't do that it will say it cannot install onto that partition.

Get your win 7 partition sized correctly from the beginning and don't try to mess around with re-sizing it unless you are darn good and know exactly how to cover yourself.

Start right now thinking what your backup strategy needs to be!
 
M

mrcr3nk

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Nov 21, 2011
7
0
What a tedious process... I even tried iDefrag in target disk mode with my iMac and still it wouldn't let me do Bootcamp. Horrible! :(
 
M

mrcr3nk

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Nov 21, 2011
7
0
I tried what you suggested, booted into Recovery and wiped the disk. I could erase it but I could not repartition the main drive to ensure it is one whole block again.

I just kept getting the error "Disk cannot be unmount".

Any ideas? :confused:
 
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