boot camp partition on macbook help

[macmacmacmacmac]

i used boot camp assistant to partition my macbook HD. everything was going well, and then it told me to restart my computer by holding down the power button. i pressed it until the screen went black and then took my finger off. i then pressed the power button again and my computer started up as normal. a guide i was following told me a white screen should appear with the apple logo and a progress bar. this didnt appear, but i noticed the amount of GB available on my HD icon on the desktop had gone down by the amount i set the partition to. i checked disk utility to see if the partition had been made but there was no partition. now when i try to create a partition using boot camp assistant again it tells me im not allowed.
has anyone experienced this before or could anyone give me any help?

 

[ayeying]

Go back to the Boot Camp Assistant and restore the drive to a single partition.

 

[macmacmacmacmac]

it doesnt give me that option, it only lets me create a partition

 

[killmoms]

Wow. At this point you should just be grateful you still have a working system and that all your data is intact. You experienced a kernel panic during a non-destructive drive re-partitioning, which is nearly always guaranteed to hose your entire drive's contents, causing you to lose everything on it and have to start from scratch.

At this point though neither utility is going to be happy and you're probably going to have to re-partition destructively, which means you'll need to back up your data (which you should've done before setting out to create a Boot Camp partition anyway) and re-setup your computer.

 

[ayeying]

back up using time machine (if you can) and wipe the hard drive and restore it using a time machine back up. Afterwards, redo the partition.

 

[macmacmacmacmac]

wow, crap. i didnt realise it was that serious. would it do my computer any damage to just leave it as it is, or is it necessary to set up my macbook again

 

[macmacmacmacmac]

sorry for the double post, but when backing up files, is it necessary to back up anything OTHER than the files i want (word docs, music, photos, etc) or are there certain system files i have to copy over to my external HD?