Boot Camp Installation Problem

[francis21]

Here's my problem: As I go and start Boot Camp, after pressing the Continue button, I am welcomed by the screen that says "The startup disk does not have enough space to be partitioned. You must have at least 10 GB of free space available" The weird thing is, I have 18.28 GB of free space available. Is there kind of a restriction (i.e. do you need to have 20 GB or more) - because I already have more than 10 GB of free space? Is there anyway to bypass this problem?

Thanks!

 

[simsaladimbamba]

You may have 18GB free HDD capacity, but Boot Camp needs the space it wants to partition in a continouos area, thus if you have 18GB free, the 10GB you want to partition might not be continouos enough for Boot Camp.
The only way to do this, would be to clone your existing Mac OS X installation onto an external HDD, then erasing the internal HDD while booted from Mac OS X on the external HDD and then cloning it all back.

Use CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper to make a 1:1 copy.
How to format a new HDD to install Mac OS X or make a bootable copy onto​

 

[francis21]

You may have 18GB free HDD capacity, but Boot Camp needs the space it wants to partition in a continouos area, thus if you have 18GB free, the 10GB you want to partition might not be continouos enough for Boot Camp.
The only way to do this, would be to clone your existing Mac OS X installation onto an external HDD, then erasing the internal HDD while booted from Mac OS X on the external HDD and then cloning it all back.

Use CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper to make a 1:1 copy.
How to format a new HDD to install Mac OS X or make a bootable copy onto​

So what you're saying is: Clone my current Mac OS X 10.6 drive then boot Mac OS X from there? And while I'm booting off of my Mac OS X drive, then I install Boot Camp from there right?

Thanks for the info too.

 

[simsaladimbamba]

So what you're saying is: Clone my current Mac OS X 10.6 drive then boot Mac OS X from there? And while I'm booting off of my Mac OS X drive, then I install Boot Camp from there right?

Thanks for the info too.

No, to get the 10GB you want to use Windows for in one continuous space:

• Clone existing Mac OS X installation on internal HDD to a properly formatted external HDD
• Boot from external HDD
• Erase internal HDD via Disk Utility
• Clone the existing Mac OS X installation on the external HDD to the internal HDD
• Boot from the internal HDD
• Run Boot Camp Assistant

 

[Ragnar Repoman]

Repair Disk utility worked for me

The solution for me was to run Repair Disk and also run Repair Disk Permissions. It only takes 12 minutes, so try this simple trick first.

I had the same problem with Snow Leopard (although not with Leopard). It turns out that Boot Camp really wants 20GB for Windows. So I cleared 50GB of free space and still got the "not enough space" error. I defragged using iDefrag ($30 and 3 hours) and then got the "some files cannot be moved" error.

But thanks to a tip elsewhere, I booted off my Snow Leopard install disk (hold the C key as you boot until the language selection screen appears.) From the Utilities menu on the install screen choose Disk Utility, then Repair Disk.