I seriously need help with my hard drive...

[orfeas0]

I have a new macbook air and it's full of problems... Nothing in disk utility / boot camp works as it should (and as it says!).
My boot partition (with lion) is 38gb (out of 64) and I can't ********ing (sorry I'm REALLY angry) resize it!! And I can't create another working partition either! And boot camp won't work for many reasons!
I try to resize the partition using disk utility but after dragging the partition to 60.11gb and clicking apply (and then "partition"), it takes less than a second to say "partition complete" but nothing has changed... I repaired permissions, I repaired the disk, nothing's changed! I have a 38gb partition and boot camp can't install claiming it needs more than 10gb free, and I have 15gb free!
Is anyone here capable of helping me with this issue or should I send it to iStorm (apple's representative in Greece... I bet they can't help either tbh) ?

edit: I made it and resized the partition to 47gb, but it won't go higher, showing this error :
"Partition failed with the error:
MediaKit reports partition (map) too small."
???

edit2: To clarify things, disk utility only shows me 1 partition in my disk, the Lion one.

edit3(off-topic): Is it normal that my MBA is still indexing (spotlight) after 3 days of a clean Lion install and almost 15hours/day usage?

 

[orfeas0]

I have 25gb free on my disk drive, I used iDefrag before opening boot camp, and it still says "You must have at least 10gb of free space available"...

 

[johnhurley]

I have a new macbook air and it's full of problems... Nothing in disk utility / boot camp works as it should (and as it says!).

My new macbook air 2011 i5 13 with 256 gb ssd is doing great with bootcamp and disk utility.

It kinds of seems like you have done a whole bunch of things already ( including apparently a recent clean install ) and it might be that you get better help here if you slow down a little and give us some complete background on where you started from, what your equipment is actually, and what state things are at right now.

So take a deep breath and go over all the relevant background slowly please. When in doubt give more details instead of fewer ones.

Along with relevant details as noted above some other things are:
1) Do you have a good time machine backup?
2) How much stuff do you have on your machine loaded and where did it all come from?
3) Did you perhaps restore some stuff and older apps from a different machine that may be causing issues?

 

[orfeas0]

My new macbook air 2011 i5 13 with 256 gb ssd is doing great with bootcamp and disk utility.

It kinds of seems like you have done a whole bunch of things already ( including apparently a recent clean install ) and it might be that you get better help here if you slow down a little and give us some complete background on where you started from, what your equipment is actually, and what state things are at right now.

So take a deep breath and go over all the relevant background slowly please. When in doubt give more details instead of fewer ones.

Along with relevant details as noted above some other things are:
1) Do you have a good time machine backup?
2) How much stuff do you have on your machine loaded and where did it all come from?
3) Did you perhaps restore some stuff and older apps from a different machine that may be causing issues?

1) I don't have a time machine backup, but I do have my important files on a flash usb.
2) I just reinstalled Lion so nothing.
3) I didn't restore anything.

What I did is try to install windows with boot camp, and when it didn't work I tried to install ubuntu (to partition with it, since boot camp didn't work). That was obviously a bad idea, because what I believe happened is my disk has some leftovers from ubuntu which disk utility cannot see and cannot erase. So, to fix this, must I use ubuntu and partition?

After a clean install I tried to use boot camp but it won't recognize my usb as a windows xp installer :S

 

[orfeas0]

I got boot camp to start the partitioning to install windows, but it stopped:
"The disk cannot be partitioned because some files cannot be moved.
Back up the disk and use Disk Utility to format it as a single Mac OS Extended (Journaled) volume. Restore your information to the disk and try using Boot Camp Assistant again."

Basically, it's what I said in my last post. Ubuntu probably has some leftovers unmovable files which mac OSX can't see...

 

[johnhurley]

I got boot camp to start the partitioning to install windows, but it stopped:
"The disk cannot be partitioned because some files cannot be moved.
Back up the disk and use Disk Utility to format it as a single Mac OS Extended (Journaled) volume. Restore your information to the disk and try using Boot Camp Assistant again."

Basically, it's what I said in my last post. Ubuntu probably has some leftovers unmovable files which mac OSX can't see...

If you are sure you have all your important files on a flash drive here is one possible way to proceed.

In mac os x using Lion Recovery Disk assistant make a Lion recovery usb flash drive.

Go into either your recovery on your local hard drive or using the lion recovery flash drive and erase completely your hard drive. Start all over fresh and delete all the partitions and erase it.

Reinstall Lion using the lion recovery flash disk. That will need a connection to the internet and depending on how fast a connection you have it will take a fair amount of time to download the latest version of Lion. One alternative is going to an apple store where they have good bandwidth.

When you reinstall Lion like that it will re-create your recovery partition.

Once you get all the way done with that and Lion is back installed again then put your important files back onto your system. Recommended get an external hard drive and start getting some time machine backups put into place.

Run and install any missing maintenance from apple like EFI firmware updates or whatever might not be on your system. Get another set of backups after that.

Then proceed carefully with the bootcamp install again ... carefully. Getting creative along the way and mixing and matching different operating systems into different partitions can get you off the marked trail pretty dang quickly.

 

[orfeas0]

If you are sure you have all your important files on a flash drive here is one possible way to proceed.

In mac os x using Lion Recovery Disk assistant make a Lion recovery usb flash drive.

Go into either your recovery on your local hard drive or using the lion recovery flash drive and erase completely your hard drive. Start all over fresh and delete all the partitions and erase it.

Reinstall Lion using the lion recovery flash disk. That will need a connection to the internet and depending on how fast a connection you have it will take a fair amount of time to download the latest version of Lion. One alternative is going to an apple store where they have good bandwidth.

When you reinstall Lion like that it will re-create your recovery partition.

Once you get all the way done with that and Lion is back installed again then put your important files back onto your system. Recommended get an external hard drive and start getting some time machine backups put into place.

Run and install any missing maintenance from apple like EFI firmware updates or whatever might not be on your system. Get another set of backups after that.

Then proceed carefully with the bootcamp install again ... carefully. Getting creative along the way and mixing and matching different operating systems into different partitions can get you off the marked trail pretty dang quickly.

Thanks for the tip.
2 questions : To make a Lion Recovery flash disk, can I do it from inside Lion, or must I boot Lion Recovery while holding R in the boot up? because When holding R I don't see a lion recovery any more, just my Lion partition...
I screwed up big time :/ but even what you suggested I don't think that will work, because Mac's disk utility doesn't recognize the partitions made by ubuntu. I'll try it though.

 

[orfeas0]

I finally managed to fix my partitions, I now have a 60gb partition with Lion, up and running!
But the boot camp problem remains: Why won't Boot Camp Assistant create a bootable usb key???

 

[johnhurley]

Why won't Boot Camp Assistant create a bootable usb key???

How about some specific details as already requested.

What exact machine do you have? What year, what processor, how much memory, what size disk etc?

Believe it or not the people here on this forum are not mind readers.

When I go into boot camp assistant I get an option that says "Create a Windows 7 install disk ... You need a USB flash drive and a Windows 7 ISO image".

It works just peachy for me ... I had a Windows 7 ISO image already on one flash drive ( setup ahead of time by me ) and everything just worked.

When you say "Why doesn't it ... " what exact problem are you having?

*** Additional info ***

You really are pushing the limits trying to do a dual boot setup with just 60 gb of space available. Conceivably it might be doable but man that is a tight space constraint to live in for very long. If you absolutely insist on trying to jury rig something in that small of a space doing something like virtual box and creating a vm to run windows on might be a better solution ( avoiding creating 2 partitions ). Then again if you only have 2 gb of RAM that's probably not much good either.

 

[orfeas0]

How about some specific details as already requested.

What exact machine do you have? What year, what processor, how much memory, what size disk etc?

Believe it or not the people here on this forum are not mind readers.

When I go into boot camp assistant I get an option that says "Create a Windows 7 install disk ... You need a USB flash drive and a Windows 7 ISO image".

It works just peachy for me ... I had a Windows 7 ISO image already on one flash drive ( setup ahead of time by me ) and everything just worked.

When you say "Why doesn't it ... " what exact problem are you having?

*** Additional info ***

You really are pushing the limits trying to do a dual boot setup with just 60 gb of space available. Conceivably it might be doable but man that is a tight space constraint to live in for very long. If you absolutely insist on trying to jury rig something in that small of a space doing something like virtual box and creating a vm to run windows on might be a better solution ( avoiding creating 2 partitions ). Then again if you only have 2 gb of RAM that's probably not much good either.

It's just that boot camp wasn't working for windows xp. After I fixed my partition by installing ubuntu on the lost 10gb space (and then formatting it with disk utility), I installed windows 7 smoother than ever.

Just a tip to everyone else: Do not try to install windows XP with OSX Lion. Go for WIN7!