Help needed to recover from aborted Bootcamp install.

I have a fairly new MacBook air which is running El Capitan latest updates. I started the process of installing Windows 10 and Bootcamp. Everything was installing OK until the Realtek Drivers were running. After about 60 minutes, it appeared to me that the install was hung up. So, I cancelled the installed. After this action on my part, I discovered that all BootCamp utilities were not properly installed. The utility I immediately missed was the option from the Windows screen to boot back to my Mac. So I did a hard boot of my Mac from the option of holding the option key while depressing the restart key. As you know, this provides the screen to chose Mac or Windows (BootCamp) boot of the system.

OK, once I got my Mac software booted, I decided to "get rid" of my BootCamp/Windows software and start the whole install process over. So, I went into Disk Utility and ERASED THE BOOTCAMP PARTITION.

THIS WAS A MAJOR MISTAKE. I should have used Bootcamp to REMOVE the bootcamp partition.

Good learning experience.

At this point, I have two partitions on my start up disk and the bootcamp utility will NOT installed to this system.

I need help to REMOVE the bootcamp partition which is empty of all files. Once, that is accomplished, I plan to try again to install bootcamp and Windows.

I sincerely appreciate your help and time to respond with your help.

Hal Smith

Boot to recovery (command + r) and use Disk Utility to remove the Boot Camp partition and then use the partition tab to expand your OS X partition. That operation may or may not be possible depending on where the Boot Camp partition was originally created. If you're having problems with it, provide a screen shot for us to look at.

Thank you for your response and time to send it. I was finally able to figure out that Disk Utility has an option to reduce the space allocation to a partition to zero bytes and then was able to delete the bootcamp partition. I then reinstalled Windows via bootcamp. The install again hung up installing the Realtek Audio driver. I cancelled the install and installed the Realtek driver individually from the USB media. At this point, Windows is working. However, after trying to use the new OS (Windows), I DO NOT PLAN TO USE WINDOWS 10. I hope I do not have the need to run a Windows only app. The new Windows is NOT intuitive and falls very short of a friendly OS like El Capitan.

Glad to hear that you got Windows installed. Most of us have been through the "Windows stage" thinking that we needed to use it for one or more apps. Usually the best method of installing Windows in those situations is to use a virtual machine. VM software is easy to setup and does not require partitioning the hard drive or re-booting to use Windows. We recommend using VirtualBox from Oracle because it's free and fairly easy to get working. However, it's better to find a comparable Mac OS X program and use it instead. Sometimes that may not be possible especially for certain games.

Good idea and thanks for the info. Hal Smith