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Bootcamp Partition Error: "Files cannot be moved"

Leopard and idefrag

ElCambo said:
Has anyone figured out how to fix this bootcamp issue on leopard?? I cant use idefrag because it wont work on leopard. I need to get XP working but bootcamp wont let me do this! Agghhh so frustrating, im not going to do what it says and wipe my computer. Is there any alternative to idefrag for leopard?!
Click to expand...

Hi! I used Idefrag with Leopard and it worked fine. Here is the message I got from the Idefrag company (Coriolis) about that issue :

"Many of you will be aware that we had been recommending not running iDefrag or iPartition from Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5) due to a bug in Leopard that was causing disks attached to a controller supported by Apple's AHCI driver to seemingly freeze-up during operation.
After much investigation, Apple has supplied us with a workaround for the
problem. We have, therefore, release iPartition version 3.0.1 and iDefrag
version 1.6.5, which contain the workaround and as a result they should be
safe to run on Leopard. The workaround may reduce performance on affected systems, however we anticipate that a bug fix for the AHCI driver will be made available as part of a future Leopard update. Please remember that Apple does not speculate on future releases of its products, so, like you,
we have no information to indicate when this might happen."

Hope this helps!
 
This just happened to me and it is insanely irritating....If I back everything up using an external HD and Time Machine and then format and reinstall Leopard everything should be okay, right??
 
I'm really getting sick of this problem and Apple needs to find a way to fix this.
The weird thing about it is that it doesn't always happen, more like 8 out of 10 times.
Before I managed to get it working with the use of Disk Warrior and the Disk Utility (from the OS X install disc), but now it doesn't work at all :mad:

I don't have an external HDD and I'm not gonna use 20 dvds to back everything up and reinstall.

Now I need to buy an external HDD just for this...it's ridiculous.
 
Working now

I had the same problem when installing windows through boot camp the second time (i.e. installed windows, delete the partition and restore the free space, trying to install windows again). When trying to allocate 32GB space it failed with the error.

If fixed it by:

1) boot into single user mode.
2) run fsck -fy
3) type reboot and press enter
4) try boot camp again.

Seemed to work for me twice now.
 
yup

monty77 said:
Nice iDefrag tip .. I tried it but didn't do the boot CD defrag so I still got the error.

I ended up using the suggestion from Bootcamp. I backed up my boot drive using super duper, then erased the HD and restored the backed up image to it again. This has the same affect as a defrag but perhaps a tiny bit quicker, depending on your HDD size .. this process took ~5 hours for 80Gb of data.

Nasty error though .. I thought HFS didn't suffer from fragmentation?

Cheers,
Adam
Click to expand...

This is exactly what I am doing right now. I am running my comp. off my external. I hope it works for me as well. For those who can't erase, or don't have a large enough External, I would def. try de-fragging. Less risky.
 
Here is an easy solution for:
1. not able to move file and cannot partition
2. you get any other error message when trying to partition

put in your mac os x install disc and boot from it
go into disk utility
verify it, repair if needed and repair the permissions to be safe

then use disk utility to partition the amount you what
(somehow the disk utility does a different thus better job at partitioning than bootcamp)

after the volumn is partitioned to the way you like it,
(make sure you actually see the partition under the volumn in the left column, it doesn't matter if the partition doesn't work)
resize the volumn back into one piece and apply it
(all this step does is to ensure that the area you partitioned is ready to be partitioned by the methods that boot camp use)

then proceed with boot camp assistances
 
Okay, so the real problem is just finding continuous space to add the partition too, which will probably end up being at the end of the disk. So what I did is move most of my larger files off my computer, then download the demo version of iDefrag, with this you can see where files are on your drive and which are the most fragmented. The file that I found was causing the problem was the sleepimage file, which is used on newer Macs to hold the contents of the RAM when the computer goes to sleep to prevent data loss in case of power failure. This file is generally written towards the end of the disk and is as big as the amount of RAM ou have (4gb for me). You can delete this file and it'll free up a good portion of the end of your disk and will hopefully solve this problem for you as it did for me.

Just open the terminal and type sudo rm /private/vars/vm/sleepimage

Then open up Boot Camp and create the partition; the sleepimage file will be recreated automatically by OS X the next time you boot or go to sleep.
 
Thanks for all the tips, this is retarded that its still an issue, and Apple doesn't at least admit what the problem is or offer a work around. Hopefully one of them works.

Edit: None so far, going to try iDefrag demo as the last resort.

EDIT 2: For the record, for a 55 gig partition, 180 gigs of "free space" was required before enough was actually available. Finally got it done though.
 
StuBeck said:
Thanks for all the tips, this is retarded that its still an issue, ...
Click to expand...

For the last time, this problem is inherent in ALL file systems on ALL computers (except for true RAIDs). Thus this problem is not Apple's fault. It is not Microsoft's fault. It is not Intel's fault. It is the fault of the computer scientists or computer engineers (whatever they wish to be called) who invented a method for quickly storing data on magnetic disks. What they invented leads to problems with files being in places that perhaps you'd prefer them not to be, but it significantly increases performance. This was fine in the days before people liked to partition things. However, people like to install Windows on their Macs now, which means partitioning is needed.

Apple won't give a better solution that reformat because you should have all your data backed up anyway. If you're using Boot Camp, that means you have Leopard. That means you have Time Machine. That means you can make backups whenever you damn well please, and there's no excuse for you not to. Besides, telling people to backup and reformat is much simpler than going through long explanations of what the problem is, which you could find out for yourself if you were really that interested. If you were that interested, you would also find out how to use iDefrag or Disk Genius to defragment your disk, so Apple doesn't have to tell you anyway.

So there. Other than the inventors, you only have yourself to blame for not installing Windows earlier, before files got put into the place where you wanted Windows.
 
whell i have Coriolis CDMaker and iDefrag 1.6.6. can any one help me on how to craete a boot cd? i tried to make a boot cd using CDMaker but no luck :( my mac just not start from CD. This is what i do:

1. Start CDMaker. Created a temple of mac files.
2. Then inserter a blank CD to burn the temple files whit idisk.app
3. Restarting mac. Affter mac sound i hold C button to start from CD
4. CD won't start it boots to mac hdd :(
 
Deadeye* said:
whell i have Coriolis CDMaker and iDefrag 1.6.6. can any one help me on how to craete a boot cd? i tried to make a boot cd using CDMaker but no luck :( my mac just not start from CD. This is what i do:

1. Start CDMaker. Created a temple of mac files.
2. Then inserter a blank CD to burn the temple files whit idisk.app
3. Restarting mac. Affter mac sound i hold C button to start from CD
4. CD won't start it boots to mac hdd :(
Click to expand...

You need to hold down C before the mac sound. You can also try holding down option; if you don't get a menu asking you what device you want to boot from, you're holding down option too late. If you get a menu but the CD doesn't show up, that means Mac OS X doesn't detect it as bootable.

One last thing you can try is using the Startup Disk preference pane to set the boot device.
 
i tried those, holding option key it shows the disk but when i boot on it it just boots mac hdd :( maybe i instaled the software badly? can any one post a guide on how to settup a bootable cd?
 
A possible solution can be clearing the font-caches...

I have been struggling with this problem for 2 weeks, until I understood that files are locked when Mac OS X is started...

You can download a handy tool here called MainMenu:
http://www.santasw.com/

Clear the font cache with that program and retry... Helped me on 2 mac's so far :)
 
A Very Easy Fix

Make sure that all 'Sharing' options are turned off. I had no luck with anything up until this point. I did this, rebooted and it's now partitioning a 10GB Windows section with 14GB free for Mac OSX.
 
samuelsner said:
Make sure that all 'Sharing' options are turned off. I had no luck with anything up until this point. I did this, rebooted and it's now partitioning a 10GB Windows section with 14GB free for Mac OSX.
Click to expand...

Great Fix :D

Worked perfectly after turning off the sharing options, formatted 32GB partition no problem!

Cheers Mate.
 
"A Very Easy Fix" - worked like a charm...

samuelsner said:
Make sure that all 'Sharing' options are turned off. I had no luck with anything up until this point. I did this, rebooted and it's now partitioning a 10GB Windows section with 14GB free for Mac OSX.
Click to expand...

OMG it was so simple... :) I just wasted some time I should have started to read this thread from the end. I didn't have to do anything else just turn off the all the sharing options and no more "Files cannot be moved" error! Thanks :D :D
 
I got the could not partition because files cannot be moved error, but not heard about this fix, but it worked for me:

Install iDefrag, back up with SuperDuper onto external HD or partition, then reboot from SuperDuper clone, launch iDefrag and do 'full defrag' of Macintosh HD.

After that you'll have some extra HD free space and you can use Boot Camp to create your windows partition.

Turning off sharing, quitting all apps, using iDefrag in online mode - none worked for me.

SuperDuper + iDefrag (full defrag) did!
 
Just like to add my 2 cents

I have unibody late 08 MBP and the current iDefrag CDMaker couldn't make a bootable disc for me. So the two options:
1. Create new OSX onto external HDD and run iDefrag from there
2. As above use Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper and then run iDefrag

Current CDMaker does NOT make bootable discs for unibody late 08 MBP
 
my have same problem with bootcamp

my problem same as all u off. please any solvings?? please help! no can install osX new...tried all, even books 2.1 (usually all probs solves like this) :eek::eek:

maybe works like new with vista? anyone try using vista? can work maybe? or is version new osX bootCamp? also tried partition 5gb maybe smaler? is to big, could be? anybody try? :apple::mad::apple:

me not like a apples, apple smelly like bad egg with bad sock smell...my go back to unix!!!!! this very horrible, and not even look good...:mad::mad::mad:
 
levydesign said:
It seems from my experience with Boot Camp, that it does not support over a 10G partition at this time. 10G and under does not give this error, so if you want to use windows on a bigger partition, you will have to partition it before hand. Simply having boot camp installed seems to give you access to booting from a Windows disk in startup disk. I will keep playing with it and see what I can come up with. I did get 15 and 17 to work, have not tried 19 yet.
Click to expand...

I tried to partition on 8G but it wouldnt work still gave me the same problem. Can you help me please
 
Restarting?

Okay, so I think I have the simplest solution yet.

I restarted my computer.

However, after that, I also decided to eject the Windows 7 install disc.

I'd recommend that anyone try this first, as it seems that a lot of solutions that people have found are specific to them, and don't always apply to everybody.

Thanks!
 
+1 on simply rebooting... before you try ifrag and all the other suggestions above, see if rebooting releases whatever locked files boot camp assistant can't move.
 
empty space in volume

I have what I feel is somewhat a related problem. I had deleted my old partition with vista, however using disk utility instead of boot camp (mistake there.) So i have just my original volume, with all this empty space its not recognizing. So I go and expand it in the partition settings. I hit apply and it gives me an error saying I need to repair or verify the volume. This is somewhat frustrating because I have about 40 gigs of space just not being used. Any ideas why it wont let me add the 40 gigs on to my original mac volume?
 
did you try to go into boot camp anyways and reset it? or does boot camp not recognize that there used to be another partition?
 
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