BOOTCAMP not able to partition

[MAC MANZ]

I have a MacBook Pro15-inch, Early 2011 4 GB 1333 MHz DDR3 AMD Radeon HD 6750M 1024 with dual boot SNOW LEOPARD AND OS X Lion 10.7.2.

I have a full version of windows 7 from best buy.

I read instructions and viewed you tube and read many forums. I have a problem.

The instructions say to run Boot Camp and partition your drive.

BUT.....
"The startup disk cannot be partitioned or restored to a single partition."

"The startup disk must be formatted as a single Mac OS Extended (Journaled) volume or already partitioned by Boot Camp Assistant for installing Windows."

I am not able to select "INSTALL OR REMOVE WINDOWS 7" task or the create install image with windows 7 task.

So can anyone help. I want to install windows 7 on a early 2011 MBP

 

[David085]

If all fail then reformat SL or Lion whatever you have and reinstall the whole thing hope this helps

 

[MJL]

Hm, it is exactly that what it says. You need to have only either Lion or SL installed and then you can partition using bootcamp.

Problem is that Windows needs to use a MBR and OS X wants to use a GUID partitioning scheme so you'll finish up with a hybrid partitioning scheme which is a pain in the proverbial place to restore.

What is it that you want to do with the Windows install? If you need it natively then you can get away with making time machine backups of both SL and Lion and then use diskutil from an external booted HDD / SL DVD to change the partitioning scheme to MBR, install Windows and use Partition Magic to create some Apple HFS partitions and restore the time machine backups in those. There is one gotcha in that: if you ever need to do an EFI upgrade then you'll need GUID partitioning.

The alternative is to run the Windows under VMWare but as I mentioned elsewhere I have found the mouse control to have some lag and function keys assigned under windows having OS X functions (rather than the assigned ones) so mapping of the function keys is up the creek. Still trying to work out what is exactly a decent work around for that. Would not touch Parallels with a bargepole, wasted a lot of time and could not get it to work without continously giving me error messages and crashing.

I have never played around with it but perhaps you may need to look at rEFIt, it may do what you need.