Bootcamp problem

[nomansohail]

When i start bootcamp, after pressing the Continue button, I am welcomed by the screen that says "The startup disk does not have enough space to be partitioned. You must have at least 10 GB of free space available" even though i have over 20GB of free space available.

I have already used superduper to make a 1:1 copy onto a 500GB external drive booted my macbook from there formatted my internal drive and then copied all the data back onto the drive but i still have the same problem could someone help me please i am really desprate ??..

 

[-tWv-]

Try to defrag your hard drive. Even though you may have 20gb of free space overall, it may not be 20gb of contiguous free space which is needed to partition the drive. Defragging will move all the files into one contiguous sector, and may help.

I don't know of any free defrag utilities but iDefrag offers a demo version which you could use just to help solve this issue. I think it will allow you to defrag your drive with the demo but if not then you may have to purchase it in order to use the full capability of the program.

 

[nomansohail]

thanks alot mate much appreciated ill post the results ASAP and another thing i have the official iso downloaded and i have it on my external 500 GB HDD could i install windows from there as i have a macbook air and wouldn't want to invest $100 in an optical drive

installing windows has already cost me a lot .

 

[-tWv-]

I know if you restore the .iso file to your hard drive using disk utility you can use it to install windows.. The problem is that I am not sure if bootcamp will recognize it as a windows boot disk. Maybe someone else can answer that.

I would try anyways, but what I would do is make a smaller partition on your hard drive that is just big enough to hold the .iso file (like 10 gb). So you don't waste all that space if you need it for something else. Use disk utility to restore the .iso file to the small partition and then try to run bootcamp and see if it recognizes the partition as the windows disk.

 

[Mindfield]

I wanna thank touchdown for the advice of defragmenting the Windows -partition. I had issues installing both Boot Camp and a Service Pack, but defragmenting worked! I never would've thought such a solution would work, because it's the same data, but scattered on a wider area. But it did, so thanks

 

[-tWv-]

No Problem! I'm glad it worked out for you, hopefully it did for the OP as well

 

[Ragnar Repoman]

Repair Disk utility worked for me

The solution for me was to run Repair Disk and also run Repair Disk Permissions. It only takes 12 minutes, so try this simple trick first.

I had the same problem with Snow Leopard (although not with Leopard). It turns out that Boot Camp really wants 20GB for Windows. So I cleared 50GB of free space and still got the "not enough space" error. I defragged using iDefrag ($30 and 3 hours) and then got the "some files cannot be moved" error.

But thanks to a tip elsewhere, I booted off my Snow Leopard install disk (hold the C key as you boot until the lanuage selection screen appears.) From the Utilities menu on the install screen choose Disk Utility, then Repair Disk.