Boot Camp: "Files cannot be moved"

Very common problem and you have 2 choices. Either try one of the various Mac defragging programs like iDefrag which may or (more likely) may not work, or back up your HD, reinstall the OS and partition from bootcamp.

 

You need a sufficiently large external drive to hold all the information on your laptop drive. That drive must be formatted to HFS+ (Mac journaled). Then you can use the restore function in disk utility to clone the laptop drive to the external drive.

Next you boot the Leopard or Snow Leopard install disk and partition your laptop disk, which will wipe all the information. Then install OS X from scratch. When you come to the point where you are asked if you want to load programs or data from another Mac you point to the external drive clone.

After this you will have a spanking new installation with all your previous data on board. Try to partition your drive with bootcamp again.

Before you do all this check how full your drive is. You should have at least 25% free space after you have installed Windows. With the tiny disk you are using this is not likely. You may want to replace your 120 GB disk with a 320 or 500 GB disk before doing all the installation work. This is a good time for such a move. iFixit.com has good tutorials on how to exchange hard disks in a MP or MBP.

Of course you could also put some of your data on the external disk to get more space. If that is preferrable you should make two partitions on the external disk. One for the data you are going to keep external and a second for the cloning.

 

Those are not the only options. I just had this problem and I did not have to reinstall or defrag.

Here's what I did:
1. Boot from the OS install disk or a bootable backup copy
2. Run Disk Utily and repair your hard drive
3. Reboot into your normal OS
4. Run Boot Camp and partition.

I had Boot Camp throw the same error near the end of the partition process after I did this. I looked at the hard drive using the demo of iDefrag and saw a couple of very very small fragments that could not be moved. I restarted and ran Boot Camp again and it finished without issue.

You may want to try this before reinstalling everything. This is much faster than defraging the entire hard drive.

 

I also had to turn off file sharing to get it to work in Snow Leopard.

 

Sorry to hear that didn't work. Looks like I might have been lucky.

It looks to me like your current scheme is 1 partition. I don't know if changing will help. It will cause you to erase your HD though. Using iDefrag would probably be a better option. It just takes a long time to complete. You might want to let it run overnight.

I saw a suggestion in another thread (sorry, I don't have the link) that you could clone your HD using SuperDuper and then restore your HD from the backup. Supposedly this restores your HD in one continuous block leaving you a continuous block of blank space a the end of the HD that Boot Camp will like. Probably not any quicker than iDefrag, but you can do it for free if you have an external HD.

Good luck. Let us know if you get it to work. This seems like a YMMV type of issue.

 

I went through this when I first wanted to put bootcamp on. I did the defrag and a few other things, nothing worked. I ended up doing as they said, backing everything up to an external disk and then starting from scratch. I didn't have much installed so I just backed up my documents.

But once it was done it was fine. And it works great.

 

This has been driving me friggin nuts. I attempted to partition BOTH my iMac and my MacBook, and they both gave me this error ><

 

Microsoft database

I also got this error.

I tried moving all files to a USB drive one by one. Nothing worked until I removed the microsoft office 2008 database. After that partitioning went fine.

Before you can transfer the database file and delete it from your boot drive you need to kill the daemon in Activity Monitor.

Probably best to restore the database before installing XP.

Hope that helps.

 

I got this error as well and have been looking around the forums to find possible solutions. I had not thought to worry or move old Office files, but I will take a look at that and add it to my list of possibilities when I get home from work.

Thanks, Scott

Update: I was able to successfully partition my drive after booting from a CD and compacting my HD.