Boot Camp Partition Problem

[scyther890]

Hey guys, i have a REALLY annoying issue...

Well a few days ago i wanted windows on my mac, so i got my windows xp disc and etc. I backed up my drive incase i would wipe out my HD somehow and backed it up via time machine. So when the day came, i asked for a partition about 25GB out of my whole HD which had a total space of 300GB. It also has about 78GB of free space right now. After 1 minute, it came up with a warning saying could not partition, files were un-movable or something like that. I then read about this and realised i used to have parallels installed, so then i needed to defrag it. After getting iDefrag, i ran a full defrag running on my other disc so it could defrag all the system files unlike a quick one ran from the hard drive itself. After the defragmentation completed, i went back to the proper drive and ran the boot camp assistant again, only to receive the same message. After all this trouble i still really want windows on my iMac..

Please help!

 

[MarkMS]

Have you followed this yet? http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2414

I know you tried iDefrag, but this may be different. It has helped me when I got that same error on my MacBook Pro. Same thing with my friend's iMac a few months back.

 

[simsaladimbamba]

You need to reformat the whole 300GB HDD, no way around this.
But you can use CarbonCopyCloner to make a clone of your existing Mac OS X partition to a properly formatted (*) external HDD, then boot from that clone, use Disk Utility to reformat the internal HDD properly (*) and then clone the contents back to the internal HDD.
After that you can run Boot Camp Assistant again successfully.

(*) How to format a new HDD/SSD to install Mac OS X or make a bootable copy onto

PS: You could also not clone your existing Mac OS X partition and just run TM again, then do a clean install of Mac OS X 10.6 (if that is your Mac OS X version) and use the restore function of the installer, but that normally does take longer than the double cloning somehow, and you can't use Mac OS X for the installation period, as when you clone, you can still use Mac OS X.
Time Machine FAQ
14. How do I restore my entire system?

Using Setup Assistant on Snow Leopard or Leopard

Setting-up a new Mac from an old one or its Backups

 

[scyther890]

I've already tried the repair disk thing still no luck . For the carbon copy cloner, it would back up all my files onto my HD right? Then i would boot up from that and wipe it out and put my files back on, but i don't think i have enough space for another large backup. For the time machine way however, i have already made a recent backup, so you're saying to format it and then place the files back on? If so elaborate or make it simpler for me please as i'm really new to this..

Thanks!

 

[simsaladimbamba]

I've already tried the repair disk thing still no luck . For the carbon copy cloner, it would back up all my files onto my HD right? Then i would boot up from that and wipe it out and put my files back on, but i don't think i have enough space for another large backup.

Yes, that is correct. But as you say, you don't have enough HDD capacity for this, TM it is I guess.

For the time machine way however, i have already made a recent backup, so you're saying to format it and then place the files back on? If so elaborate or make it simpler for me please as i'm really new to this..

Thanks!

The links I provided, especially the TM FAQ and the article "How do I restore my entire system", can help you there, or are they too complicated?

 

[scyther890]

Nah i understand it, thanks for the links and hopefully i'll do this correctly