Why won't Boot Camp just work properly for me?

[TSmith16]

Guys, I've been having the worst kind of issues installing Boot Camp for the first time. I convinced my grandmother to buy an iMac but then she wanted all her MS Office on there. Feeling bad that she already spent a ton of money on the iMac and I didn't want her to have to buy the Mac version of MS Office, I decided I'd partition Windows 7 on her iMac since she already owned the license.

HOURS AND HOURS LATER after errors and everything going wrong that could possibly go wrong, I discovered that I installed the partition with not enough space. Gaahhh!!! Now I go to remove it in Boot Camp Assistant and the remove option is grayed out. Even worse, I can't boot back into Windows and I think it's because I was messing with Disc Utility the other day. I'm very frustrated! Can anybody help me uninsta my partition so I can reinstall it?
[doublepost=1455719408][/doublepost]

Guys, I've been having the worst kind of issues installing Boot Camp for the first time. I convinced my grandmother to buy an iMac but then she wanted all her MS Office on there. Feeling bad that she already spent a ton of money on the iMac and I didn't want her to have to buy the Mac version of MS Office, I decided I'd partition Windows 7 on her iMac since she already owned the license.

HOURS AND HOURS LATER after errors and everything going wrong that could possibly go wrong, I discovered that I installed the partition with not enough space. Gaahhh!!! Now I go to remove it in Boot Camp Assistant and the remove option is grayed out. Even worse, I can't boot back into Windows and I think it's because I was messing with Disc Utility the other day. I'm very frustrated! Can anybody help me uninsta my partition so I can reinstall it?[/QUOTE
EDIT: I also get the error in Boot Camp: The Startup disc cannot be partitioned or restored to a single partition.

 

[keysofanxiety]

Guys, I've been having the worst kind of issues installing Boot Camp for the first time. I convinced my grandmother to buy an iMac but then she wanted all her MS Office on there. Feeling bad that she already spent a ton of money on the iMac and I didn't want her to have to buy the Mac version of MS Office, I decided I'd partition Windows 7 on her iMac since she already owned the license.

HOURS AND HOURS LATER after errors and everything going wrong that could possibly go wrong, I discovered that I installed the partition with not enough space. Gaahhh!!! Now I go to remove it in Boot Camp Assistant and the remove option is grayed out. Even worse, I can't boot back into Windows and I think it's because I was messing with Disc Utility the other day. I'm very frustrated! Can anybody help me uninsta my partition so I can reinstall it?

Hi TSmith, welcome to the crowd of BootCamp hell. I've been trying to install Windows on my housemate's laptop -- a 17" MacBook Pro with a faulty optical drive, and boy I still can't get it to work. But enough of my woes, hopefully I can help you!

Can you go into Disk Utility and delete the Windows partition? To do this, highlight the Windows partition in the little pie chart icon (I'm stipulating you're using El Capitan) and press the minus icon on Disk Utility to delete it, then partition it all as one volume by dragging the blue slider for the OS X partition to fill the whole thing.

I think you might need to click the 'Partition' option at the top to get that -- I'm not 100% on Disk Utility on El Cap cause I'm still on Yosemite.

Restart & hopefully you can go through the BootCamp setup again?

 

[TSmith16]

Thank you so much!!! It worked! Now, I need to reinstall Windows with more GB this time. I also agree that BootCamp is Hell. Haha!

Thank you!

 

[apfelmann]

I think BOOT CAMP is great!

I have 3 macs, from 2007, 2009 and 2014.

And on every mac I have Boot Camp and Windows 10 64bit

installing the 64bit version on the 2007 imac required some tricks but other than that, installing windows with boot camp was always super easy for me ...

 

[Strider64]

Thank you so much!!! It worked! Now, I need to reinstall Windows with more GB this time. I also agree that BootCamp is Hell. Haha!

Thank you!

My advice to you is to read Apple's Bootcamp Assistant instructions very carefully and make sure you have a good backup of the computer (I think Apple also states that). I know from personal experience that I didn't read a section very carefully and had to do a redo from the very beginning. It would had saved me a headache had I read the instructions carefully, but we're all human. Bootcamp is a pain in the butt to install, but you'll get it right this time. Just have faith.

 

[Fried Chicken]

Boot Camp Assistant is an evil mother in law that works at the DMV.