Boot Camp Assistant exhibiting foolish behaviour

Yo sup homies etcetera. I initially Boot Camp'd my iMac in December with XP Home. However today I decided to reinstall it because some odd error was causing a lot of my games to not launch.

And so I set off to my abandoned OS X partition in search of the legendary Boot Camp Assistant. I soon found it and, after backing up my files, I destroyed the Windows partition.

"YAY!" exclaimed the village people. And thusly I set about creating a new partition. This was not an unchallenged quest, however, for on the long and winding road appeared a demon. And the demon said, "plz check ur disk wiv disk utility plz lol"

And so I did such a thing, and found myself forced to boot from the OS X CD in order to Repair my Disk.

And I tried again to create my new Windows partition. However I now faced a new issue.

For on the long and winding road, there appeared another demon.

And the demon said:



I don't really feel like buying an external hard drive, backing up 200 GB of files and formatting my HDD, so does anyone have a better idea? If not, I will find an external, and the money to build myself a PC cannot come soon enough.

Also, what was the name of that diagnostic/cleanup utility for OS X? The one with the waggly tail. The one everyone tells you to run if you have a generic problem like you can't peel a banana.

You need to "de-frag" your hard drive. (remember that from Windows days?)

There are files residing in the area of your hard drive where Boot Camp needs to build a new partition and can't do it because that area is occupied.

You have basically two choices: 1. De-frag the drive with "iDefrag" a third party utility which works great and then run the Boot Camp assistant again.

http://www.coriolis-systems.com/iDefrag.php

2. Blow away your entire drive by erasing and reinstalling OS X and all your applications (backup everything first). Run the Boot Camp assistant.

Your choice. ;D

Regards.

Try running a file system check.

Turn off the machine, Turn it back on and press and hold Command + S. This will boot you into "Single User Mode". At the prompt, type:

/sbin/fsck -f

If it found and fixed anything, run it again. When finished, type:

Exit

...and restart and try again.

One of the best tools out there for this sort of thing is called DiskWarrior.

chscag said:

You need to "de-frag" your hard drive. (remember that from Windows days?)

.

Click to expand...

Any particular reason why? Fragmentation is usually not a problem unless the disk is at or near capacity. That probably isn't the case here since there's enough space to build a Windows partition.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1375?viewlocale=en_US

cwa107 said:

Turn it back on and press and hold Command + S. This will boot you into "Single User Mode".

Click to expand...

No dice.

Whenever I boot a BIOS prompt appears asking me to insert bootable media. This has been happening ever since I tried to repartition the hard drive. Uh oes.

IAmNotSuperman said:

No dice.

Whenever I boot a BIOS prompt appears asking me to insert bootable media. This has been happening ever since I tried to repartition the hard drive. Uh oes.

Click to expand...

Sounds like it's set to boot from the Windows partition as default. Try holding down Option, boot into OS X and then set it as the default startup disk in System Preferences. Then reboot and try the instructions again.

Darn it, why didn't I think of that?



...


TELL MEE!!!

Also, I went ahead and put my Windows disk in, thinking maybe the partition was there but OS X was ignoring it, but apparently no.

IAmNotSuperman said:

Darn it, why didn't I think of that?



...


TELL MEE!!!

Also, I went ahead and put my Windows disk in, thinking maybe the partition was there but OS X was ignoring it, but apparently no.

Click to expand...

Yeah, it sounds like the EFI was set to look to the no longer existent Windows partition as the default boot device. Getting back into OS X to change the standard boot device would be the best option.

I ran the fsck. The volume Macintosh HD appears to be OK. I'll try partitioning again because it's so much fun and it makes me laugh and dance.

... And I still got the same wonderful error! Oh joy!

IAmNotSuperman said:

I ran the fsck. The volume Macintosh HD appears to be OK. I'll try partitioning again because it's so much fun and it makes me laugh and dance.

... And I still got the same wonderful error! Oh joy!

Click to expand...

Are you able to successfully remove the partition? Do you have any other programs running during the partitioning process?

The partition is already gone. It's making a new one that's the problem...

IAmNotSuperman said:

The partition is already gone. It's making a new one that's the problem...

Click to expand...

Did you reboot after removing the partition?

No. I just ran it again. The dice remain absent.