Boot camp back up/whatever

ok here it goes

awhile ago I tried partitioning my hhd for duel boot with boot camp. deleted or thought I deleted partition because I never installed windows and didnt want to deal with it at the time.

now I want windows. try partitioning and get this:

"this 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."


If it helps I have wine running already but I need visual studio for a class and that wont run on wine.

should I back up and reset my computer or is there a different way?

if time machine just adds a partition to my external hhd then I will just do that, otherwise I have couple hundred gigs of photos on that I don't want to lose.

Thank you. shouldn't have bought a mac for a programming class

That message is telling you that you do not have enough contiguous space to create a BC partition. In order to get Boot Camp going you'll have to erase and reformat or buy a third party app like iDefrag to defragment the drive.

I suggest going with VM software instead. The free VirtualBox should be able to run Visual Studio. Make sure you download the correct version.

Thanks never heard of this one, sounds promising, plus I have no issues with Sun Microsystems!