THinking ahead with Boot Camp = BAD (two preexisting partitions)

[tallest]

I am very excited about being able to install windows on my MacBook Pro (for the sole purpose of gaming) but I am having a lot of trouble getting around my forethought when installing OS X.

Originally, I was planning on using the onmac.net solution, so I created two partitions, installing OS X on the second one. Unfortunately, Apple's (superior, i.e BIOS) solution requires a single partition. When I try to run Boot Camp it outputs:

[B]Your starup disk cannot be partitioned or 
restored to a single partition.[/B] 
Your startup disk must be formatted as a single Mac 
OS Extended (Journaled) volume or already 
partitioned by Boot Camp Assistant for installing 
Windows.

Any ideas on what I can do?

I tried simply installing windows to the first partition but the install disk doesn't recognize the partition scheme that OS X uses. I noticed that Disk Utility now lets you choose "Master Boot Record" under the options dialogue when partitioning. Is there any way I can repartition the drive to use a MBR without loosing all my data?

Thanks,
Aaron

 

[tallest]

Or is there any way I can merge the two partitions?

(iPartition does not support Intel Macs yet. Their site says they have a beta, but provides no way to download it.)

 

[neocell]

You might want to look at to iPartition to try and enable this without data loss, though I would not be comfortable doing this without a backup or ability to live with losing all my data

EDIT: sorry didn't see your second post while I was writing this one

EDIT: do you have an iPod (or use DVDs) you can backup your files to and then just use disk utility to get a single partition and use the systems discs to get everything back on?

 

[tallest]

My impatience has led me to just bacup to an old PC and reinstall.

It's just a little time consming reinstalling all those apps (I didn't want to do a complete backup as this would have been 35+ GB and probably would take just as long)

 

[esaleris]

I don't see why Boot Camp can't use a physical disk that has been partitioned! I'm quite fond of separating the System disk from the Data disk, so that whenever I wipe my system drive, I never have to think twice about if I'm losing data.