Boot Camp/External Drive/Time Machine

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I am trying to partition a my hard-drive in boot camp, and I get the message "Can not partition because some files can't be moved". I was told to back up my drives with Time Machine to help aid me in solving this problem. What do I do once my Hard-drive is backed up?
 
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How full is your hard drive? If its too full and you are trying to make a partition bigger than the available space, it may give that error message. (Not actually positive on this as I don't use Boot Camp.)
 

chscag

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I am trying to partition a my hard-drive in boot camp, and I get the message "Can not partition because some files can't be moved". I was told to back up my drives with Time Machine to help aid me in solving this problem. What do I do once my Hard-drive is backed up?

In addition to what member Stretch stated, that message also appears if your hard drive is fragmented. In other words, there may not be enough continuous space available to create a Boot Camp partition even though the drive has enough overall space.

There are several ways to resolve the error. First, check if there is enough space on your hard drive and let us know.
 

Slydude

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I think you're right Stretch. When Bootcamp attempts to create a partition it needs to have the space used for the partition to be contiguous. There must also be enough free space so that once the partition is complete you must still have enough free space on the OS X partition for the necessary swap files.

If I recall correctly here's how I fixed the problem (assuming you have enough drive space):
1. Create a backup of your boot drive. I like to use something like Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper so the backup is bootable.
2. Reboot the machine (from clone, DVD etc) and format the drive.You can't bot from the same drive yoyo are formatting.
3. Reload OS X
4. Run Bootcamp Assistant to create the Windows partition,
 

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