f**king boot camp assistant!

[Arkanok]

Ok, so I decided to get rid of my Windows XP partition a week ago, and now, I've got Vista so I want to install it. So I open up the boot camp assistant and proceed to partition the drive. Guess what? I got some sort of error! I think boot camp is the biggest pain in the ass to get running properly.

I included a screen of the error, which tells me that I've gotta re-install Leopard or something...


Anyways, can someone tell me why this error occured and maybe how I can get around it without re-installing os x?

Thanks

 

[2Shae]

Yeah I can tell you why this happens.

Your HD is fragmented (all over the place) and bootcamp can't find enough free hard drive space anywhere.

I've had this error message before as well and it's a b!tch.

There are only 3 things you can do to fix it:

1: Use software to defrag you hard drive i.e. iDefrag, Drive Genius 2 (DG2 corrupted my drive before so be careful and always backup) *Best option*

2: Delete as many large files from your HD, like movies for example, But for this to work you would have to delete many of GB's of data. *Not advisable since you never know how much you need to delete.*

3: A complete re-install of your Mac...not an upgrade...really a re-install.

Sorry for the bad news, but don't shoot the messenger...blame Apple

 

[Arkanok]

Yeah I can tell you why this happens.

Your HD is fragmented (all over the place) and bootcamp can't find enough free hard drive space anywhere.

I've had this error message before as well and it's a b!tch.

There are only 3 things you can do to fix it:

1: Use software to defrag you hard drive i.e. iDefrag, Drive Genius 2 (DG2 corrupted my drive before so be careful and always backup) *Best option*

2: Delete as many large files from your HD, like movies for example, But for this to work you would have to delete many of GB's of data. *Not advisable since you never know how much you need to delete.*

3: A complete re-install of your Mac...not an upgrade...really a re-install.

Sorry for the bad news, but don't shoot the messenger...blame Apple

Bah...
Yeah that kinda stinks... Now, you say I have to re-install. Would a Time Machine backup do the trick ok? Or do I have to completely do it all again from scratch?

 

[sickmacdoc]

EDIT: Nevermind- typed too slow!

This is a very common situation with partitioning using the Boot Camp Assistant- it simply means that there is not a single contiguous block of free hard drive space available in order to establish the partition at the size you are requesting.

The simplest (and free) way to defragment the hard drive to get a single block of free space is to backup your drive, format it and restore the backup which is why that is what the message tells you to do. Doing any kind of partitioning to a hard disk without a backup is playing with fire anyway, so this works out well!

 

[sickmacdoc]

Bah...
Yeah that kinda stinks... Now, you say I have to re-install. Would a Time Machine backup do the trick ok? Or do I have to completely do it all again from scratch?

The quickest method IMO is to simply clone the drive with Carbon Copy Cloner to an external drive- then reformat the internal drive and clone the info back onto it. That takes care of the problem about the simplest way, though a Time Machine restoration would work too in the end.

 

[Arkanok]

The quickest method IMO is to simply clone the drive with Carbon Copy Cloner to an external drive- then reformat the internal drive and clone the info back onto it. That takes care of the problem about the simplest way, though a Time Machine restoration would work too in the end.

Thanks for the info; I ended up doing the Time Machine backup and it worked... Although now I've got a different prob...

Vista 64 bit doesn't wanna install. It just brings me to a screen in which it says:

1.
2.
Please select cd-rom type...

but the keyboard doesn't work at all...