Help with Boot Camp and Partitioning

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I have an intel-based mac book, 2.4ghz Intel core 2 duo, 4GB ram with a 250GB hard drive and i have snow leopard installed to be exact. I would like to partition a small piece (7GB) and Install windows onto it by using Boot Camp, However, when I try to partition using boot camp I get this error message:

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.

Now, my hard drive is already formatted in Mac OS Extended(journaled), my question is, does anyone know how to fix this so I can partition my drive successfully?

I don't mind doing what the error message says, however, if I do go down that road, does anyone know exactly what to do? I've had this Mac Book for a little over a year but i'm still not up to speed on some of the more detailed features.
 
C

chas_m

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What it's trying to tell you is that your drive is too fragmented to get a clear 7GB (*way* too small BTW) partition for Windows.

The cheapest way I know to solve this problem:

1. Use SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner to make a bootable clone of your hard drive onto an external drive. Both are free to make a master clone. You should buy/donate if you're going to use it regularly.

2. Boot from the clone in order to test it, then ERASE (zero out) the boot drive.

3. Use SD or CCC to restore to the freshly-erased boot drive and reboot.

NOW you should be able to set up the partition you want. One *very important* caveat: make SURE you have ***at minimum*** more than 10GB free space AFTER the partition is created. Mac OS X needs room to work and anything under 10GB is asking for trouble.

Normally, Macs don't really need to be defragmented (or very rarely) but setting up a live partition on the boot drive requires "contiguous" space which can be hard to come by on a Mac that's been used for a while.
 

bobtomay

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The above is also the fastest way.

The added advantage to the above method, is that you now have a bootable backup.
 
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+1 for the above and the bootable backup.... an unwritten rule!
Clones=No stress :)
 
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The 7gb for windows will only be used for very minor usage (to play the original roller coaster tycoon, love that game haha), is that still too little space?

Also, I do have a portable hard drive, however, it already has about 50-80gb or so on it already so will I have to reformat the external drive and erase everything on the drive?
 

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