Boot Camp 'stole' 32 gigs?

[FubsyGamr]

Hey guys,

So, in my other thread, I was having trouble installing Empire Earth on Virtual Box and running it, so I just decided to boot camp my machine and put it on my windows partition (I had been thinking about doing this for quite some time, and this was the final straw), so I did.

I know that sometimes it takes a while for the partition to set up, so I let it start, then I went and took a shower, blah blah blah. Gave it about 45 minutes. When I came back, the computer was totally frozen. The status bar on the "partitioning" was about 1/2-way done, but it was not moving, and the blue animation inside the status bar was not moving, either. I could move the mouse around, but I could not click on anything in the Dock, nor could I use any of the touchpad commands (hiding windows, showing all, etc). I couldn't change computer volume, or anything at all. Totally frozen. I gave it another 20 minutes or so, but nothing changed.

I could not control-option-escape, either. When I pushed the buttons, nothing would happen. I felt I had no choice but to hard-power it off, then back on. When I did so, and checked my HDD space, I noticed that the 32 gigs I had allotted for boot camp had disappeared. My HDD "space available" is 32 gigs smaller than it was when I started, yet I see no partition in my Disk Utility. Similarly, if I try to boot to any other disks, it doesn't pull up anything but my MacBook Pro's HDD.

Any help on what I can do?

 

[Darth.Titan]

Clone your OS X drive to an external with Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper, boot to your cloned install and repartition and reformat your internal drive with Disk Utility, then clone your system back.

When repartitioning and reformatting your botched internal, you could also take the opportunity to create your Bootcamp partition manually. Just pick your size, format it for FAT, and label it BOOTCAMP. Then once you get OS X running again you can boot your Windows install disc by holding C at startup and select the FAT partition.

 

[Detrius]

Hopefully, you have a backup, as it appears to have crashed in the process where it was moving files out of that 32GB space. It's possible you still have files there, but the volume itself has been marked as being 32GB smaller. If you're lucky, you could just run the Boot Camp Assistant again and it'll work this time. If not, your data is already corrupt, and you'll need to restore from backup.

 

[bleepjay]

You could also try a drive repair using Disk Utility while booting your Mac Install Disc (this option is unavailable after booting from affected disk)

You may find that trying to create this again, you will have the same problem ( freezing during partitioning) This is probably due to fragmentation of the drive. I just went through this last night. $30 for IDefrag and 4 hours later my space was reclaimed (and hd defragged)

I also heard that allowing/forcing the daily/weekly/monthly scripts to run may help.