Need to reformat HD to reinstall Bootcamp?

[woodsea]

Hello,
I am in need to reinstall Bootcamp. I caught a virus before receiving Leopard. So I deleted Bootcamp from Tiger. I installed Leopard and have 10.5.2.
Now when trying to partition to the 32gb, I get a pop-up window stating
" 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."
Do I really have to go thru this? What is the best way to back up all my settings including passwords to all sites. I absolutely abhor this, as I am taking online courses and need the computer intact.

Thanks

 

[matperk]

It's really the only way to do it. I was lazy once and got around that by dropping the size of my boot camp partition by a few gigabytes and that let me install no problem.

If you're going to do it though...the best way is to get a firewire external drive and use a program like SuperDuper! or Carbon Copy Cloner to do an exact image of your internal to your external. Once that's done, boot from the external and do the same thing back. Then reboot like normal from your internal. you can then run boot camp assistant and all will be well.

 

[woodsea]

Thanks for the advice.

 

[richard.mac]

if you want you could buy iDefrag and defrag your HDD so Boot Camp Assistant can partition properly. the reason BCA is displaying that message is because there is a large amount of data on the end part of the disk and it cant move it.

 

[woodsea]

So if I copy and reformat it won't put the data on the same way?