OSX bootcamp and partition issues

Hey Y'all!

This is my first post in this forum; in truth I made this account just for this, however I believer I shall continue to use it if all goes well.

Ok I have a MacBook Pro with OSX Mountain Lion.

I am trying to install Windows on a bootcamp partition for MMOs mainly. I have installed boot camp before.

My issue is right now my partitions are all screwy.

My OSX partition is at the end of the drive. Here is an image:



I tried using bootcamp, however the boot partition is to small. This is where the main issues arrises. Normally I would just expand the OSX partition into the empty space. However my partitions are backwards and the OSX partition is at the end of the drive.


I am not sure how to fix this. I googled it, and it said use recovery to "clone" the OSX partition to the other partition then deleted the other and merge them. I have tried it 3 times and every time it comes up with a read write error. I used repair disk on both partitions and the whole drive. The partitions are sound, however for some reason it will not clone.

If this was a windows system and a PC I could do it simply, however when it comes to Macs my knowledge is a bit lacking.

I would also like to make the point that I have no extermal HD and only have 5gig of Icloud space.

Looking forward to hearing the responses!

Dave

A normal hard drive that has Mountain Lion installed will actually show two partitions: The first will be Mountain Lion and include the small EFI boot sector, the second partition on the drive will be the Recovery Partition automatically created when installing ML.

If your partitions are reversed, there is no fix other than erasing the drive and starting over. Even if it were a Windows hard drive, you would need special software to fix it (such as Partition Magic).

It's up to you how you go about this, but I recommend backing up everything that you can and then erasing the drive and starting over.

If you would like to do this, post back and we can help you with that procedure.

Hey Thanks for the reply.

Seriously all I want is windows installed. However I dont wana loss ANY data or configuration.

Is there are way I can back it up completely like and image or something an reinstall?

BTW I do not have a OSX disk and with my download speed it would take over a week to download from the recovery.

Dave

You can make a backup image of the Windows partition but without an OS X boot disk you'll have no way to reinstall. The best software available right now for backing up Windows is the new WinClone. It's not free and does require a working OS X partition in order to use it. If you would like to try, here's the link to the download: LINK

Hey,

I am not sure if I explain correctly, or if I just missunderstand what you said.

There is no windows partition. There is the partition with OSX, and then 600+gigs of free space SEPERATE from the OSX partition.

Here is an image attached.

Dave

Thanks for attaching an image. Your first attempt at attaching an image didn't upload for some reason and I guess there was some misunderstanding about what the drive looked like. Now we need to go back to square one. Forget everything above.... ;D

Let me get this straight first: Can you boot OK to the OS X partition? And, do you want to install Windows? We can go from there.

Hello,

I knida guessed there was confusion And I just noticed it did not upload,

1)Yes I can boot to the OSX partition. I am using it to write this. I will not that I have to use OPTION on boot and pick the OSX partition or it will say no boot device. It has been like that since I upgraded to ML.

2) Yes that is my whole intent in this

OK, we can go from here now.

The problem with the drive is that OS X is in the wrong place and Boot Camp is flat out not going to work. And in order to install Windows, we need to be able to either:

1. Install it via Boot Camp

2. Install it manually

Since we can't install it with Boot Camp, we can only try to install it manually. And that's going to require using Disk Utility so we can setup that first partition. However, you may be able to install Windows directly without using Disk Utility.

Do you have a valid Windows disk?

I have a windows disk.

I would prefer to use disk utility.

So how do I start?

You can't use Disk Utility without an OS X boot disk. Do you have an OS X boot disk - like Snow Leopard 10.6.8? The Lion Disk Utility won't work because you can't unmount the drive to use it.

You can try to install Windows this way: (Assuming you have at least XP SP2, Vista, or Windows 7)

Boot the machine with your Windows disk. The Windows installer should start and you can follow the prompts. When it gets to the part where it asks about which partition it should be installed on, select the first partition (the large one). Go ahead and format it as NTFS and then proceed with installing Windows.

Of course that's going to give you one very large Windows Partition. If that's OK with you, you should be good to go. In order to boot to OS X when you startup, just hold down the option key and select OS X. Otherwise, the default startup will probably be Windows.

Hopefully, installing Windows that way will not hurt the OS X partition or boot capability. But without an OS X boot disk and running Boot Camp, there is no guaranty it will work to keep OS X.

Hey.

I can boot into the boot partition; and no boot disk.

BTW I only want like 100gigs of Windows The rest for Media ETC

Dave

Then you're going to need a boot disk. The reason you can't do any partitioning from Lion even though you can boot to it is because you can not make changes to a hard drive that you're using. In other words, the drive has to be unmounted. And the only way to do that is from a boot disk.

IF I boot to the recover partition I can make changes, It just wont let me clone for some reason.

And I have a Win7 boot disk

If you can make changes from the Recovery partition you should be able to divide that large partition into a smaller partition for Windows. The problem you're going to have with doing it that way, is there is no way to make the OS X partition larger. You're going to wind up with a whole bunch of unusable space on the drive.

Like I said at the beginning of this thread, the best way is to start over and get that OS X partition to the front of the drive.

How are you trying to clone the OS X partition? What software are you using?

Using restore from boot partition

Yeah, the restore function is not designed to do a clone. I don't know if SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner would work to clone the partition and then restore it to a different location on the drive but you could try if you want.

I believe SuperDuper has a trial version that works but you'll need an external hard drive first to do the cloning.