Boot camp said it couldn't partition, so i am backing up as it suggested

tried to partition with boot camp and it said some file couldnt be moved. So i went out and bought a external hard drive , i needed one any way.
Doing a back up as we speak.
Boot camp said to format and then format in journal format etc....
my question is:
since i am backing up is all my stuff backing up? like book marks, passwords, photos anything that i dont want to lose.
thanks

If you can, you might try choosing a smaller partition for Windows.
But to answer your question we need to know how you are backing up. If you are making a clone with something like Carbon Copy Cloner (but not SuperDuper! as it is not yet Leopard compatible) then you shouldn't lose data, preferences, or bookmarks. The same should be true of Time Machine, provided you aren't excluding folders which contain things like bookmarks, passwords, or photos--but you would have had to do that manually. But some of the software which comes with external hard drives is worse than useless.

Similar Messages

Can i use an external hard drive in windows to add additional storage after my initial partition is set up. i want to add a 500 GB hard drive to use with my windows. I set windows up in boot camp with a 50 GB partition?

can i use an external hard drive in windows to add additional storage after my initial partition is set up. i want to add a 500 GB external hard drive to use with my windows. I set windows up in boot camp with a 50 GB partition? I now want to add another 500 GB?

Yes. Windows supports external USB drives.

Installing Boot Camp - There is only one partition available for Windows

I have a brand new Mac Mini. Ran Boot Camp assistant and created Windows partition - 80 GB. Then when instructed, inserted Windows XP install disc. It went through some install steps then came to screen where you chose the partition to install Windows. There was only one partition showing - Partition 1. I think that's the Mac partition, so I quit install, removed partition with Boot Camp and tried again, this time setting Windows partition at 32GB. Insert Windows install disc, same result - only Partition 1. I called Apple support, we did it all again - same result. They had me completely reformat my Mac disc with the OSX discs, then run Boot Camp assistant and set partition to 32 GB. Same result - only Partition 1 is available. The Windows install disc I am using is the same disc I used to put Windows on my son's MacBook about 9 months ago.
I need this Mac Mini to run both OS. What to do?

Use NTFS for Windows and buy Paragon NTFS for OS X
You can also try Paragon HFS for Windows
As long as you are using for data and backups, you can leave the drive as GPT too.
I would recommend strongly to always have a 2nd bootable Mac OS drive, only need 30GB partition. System maintenance. Though LIon Recovery Mode finally makes it less but not totally unneeded.
And yes you can use Windows to create a partition.
Boot Camp is too broad. Do you want or mean BC Assistant? not needed but probably possible.
MBR has trouble with 3TB drives.

Boot Camp Won't Let Me Partition

I have been trying to set up a Windows XP partition on my Macbook just to play some games, but Boot Camp won't let me partition my hard drive, saying that some files are unmovable and that I should reformat my entire hard drive. Any ideas how to get around this without losing all of my work?

None that I know of. If you have access to an external hard drive, go ahead with the backup. This way, you have a fallback no matter what happens.
In theory, when a backup is restored, files are laid down in a manner that minimizes fragmentation; so if successful in backing up, reinitializing and restoring the hard disk, you should be able to create the Boot Camp volume.
You could also experiment with creating a smaller Boot Camp volume. What the Assistant is looking for is an unbroken string of free space blocks--something between 5 GB and whatever your chosen partition size might be. Strange as it might sound, depending on your habits as a user, you might not have that unbroken string even when you have something like 100 GB free.
Hopefully, I've pointed you in a good direction here, though you may disagree with the solutions offered. They are simply the only known methods for dealing with this issue.
Nate

Help! Boot Camp has messed up my partition table!

I used Boot Camp to create a 60GB partition on my hard drive for a Windows installation; however, Boot Camp crashed and hung part way through. I left it for an hour but ultimately had to kill it forcibly.
Now I'm left with 60GB missing from my hard drive, but no partition to delete to reclaim the lost space.
Running diskutil on /dev/disk0 reports the following:
/dev/disk0
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: GUIDpartitionscheme *465.8 Gi disk0
1: EFI 200.0 Mi disk0s1
2: Apple_HFS Macintosh HD 404.9 Gi disk0s2
I've tried booting from the installation disc and running a repair via Disk Utility. This appeared to find some errors but, after repairing them, my hard disk is still 60GB down.
Short of reinstalling OS X, is there anything else I can do to remove this partially-created partition and claim back my disc space?
Message was edited by: m0thr4

Fixed it by backing everything up in Time Machine, booting off the installation DVD, erasing my main HDD (which brought its capacity back to 465GB) and then performing a restore from the last full backup.

Is it possible to bypass the number of partitions limitation (no more than 2) when trying to boot into windows by not using boot camp assistant, and instead just partitioning the drive manually?

I can't find a specific answer to this question.
I did have a functioning Windows 8 installation on my MacBook Pro previously. I tried to make a third exFAT partition so as to have a drive mutually readable/writable to both operating systems. This made it so I could no longer boot into my Windows installation.
I know I'll need the boot camp drivers installed on the Windows installation after the fact, but would manually creating a partition and installing the OS without Boot Camp Assistant work? And would I be able to boot from it while having a total of 3 partitions?

That's the spirit!
Just be sure to have your OS X junk safe in a tested backup, in case the whole thing craps out and you end up having to do a low-level partition and erase of the entire drive.
And like I said, the problem is not OS X. I've set up mine at least once with 4 partitions holding as many flavors of OS X as can run on the hardware, all perfectly bootable on demand.

Hard drive missing space after boot camp got stocked on "Creating Partition"

Hi guys, last night I was trying to install windows 7 in my computer for some gaming, the process with boot camp went well until it said "Creating Partition" there it got stocked for a good 2 hours, because of this I did a bit of research on what could happen if I would force quit it, I read that it might happen that if I restart the partition would be there or just nothing would have change but in my case none of those happened, my hard drive is keeping that space in blank without letting me use it, before trying boot camp I had 240 GB of free space and now after restart it I have 90 gb of free space, yes I tried to make the partition of 150 GB, so what should I do to repair this?, I verified the permissions on Disk Utility and I just got one weird message:
Warnin SUID file "Library/CoreS" has been modified and will not be repaired
But when I try to verify/repair I get this:
or this:

Reboot to your recovery partition and run disk utility from there, you can not repair the disk you are booted from.

Boot Camp won't let me partition because files cannot be moved

Hello, i just purchased Leopard so i could use windows (again) on my mac... after uninstalling it a long time ago back when i had Tiger and bootcamp beta.
anyway, the problem i'm having is the same as a few people: it won't let me partition my disk because some files cannot be moved, and that i need to format the disk to a single partition - Mac OSX (Journaled), even though it already IS.
most suggestions have been to erase and restore, or back up your computer on time machine... but the problem with that is i have a large amount of space being used on my external (for photos, movies, music), which would not otherwise fit on my HD, and as a result there is not enough room on my external to back up with Time Machine.
so what can i do to get Boot Camp Assistant to partition my disk so that i can install windows?

thanks for the advice - i finally managed to get it to work!
after a bunch of research i found out that it is in fact because the disk is fragmented that bootcamp assistant is unable to partition the disk (despite the many false claims that OSX does not need to be defragmented).
i didn't feel like paying for iDefrag and waiting to get it in the mail, so i downloaded the iDefrag demo and was able to see exactly where the fragments were (many of them were surprisingly mp3 files), and then i could manually delete their corresponding files to free up continuous space. (where before i couldn't even make a 5GB partition, i was able to finally make a 15GB partition after deleting about a dozen music files)
for anyone who wishes to try this, the way it works is that in order for the partition to be created, it requires a certain amount of free, CONTINUOUS space. Your computer says there is a certain amount of free space on it, but not all of it is continuous, in other words there are bits and pieces of stuff (fragments) littered throughout areas of "free" space.
When you run the iDefrag demo, there is a bar at the bottom with lots of colors which represents all the stuff on your HD. The free space refers to any area of white, and fragmented files are in red. The info bar will tell you exactly what file is being represented by the area of color when you click on it.
The idea is to find large areas of free space (white). If there are a few bands of non-red color in those areas it's OK, but you want to locate all the fragmented files (red) in those areas, find out what they are, search them in the finder and delete them (the info bar will tell you the file name, which will very likely be an mp3, as well as it's exact location on your computer). But be careful because if you don't know what you're deleting, you may screw up your computer.
If you buy iDefrag ($35.00), you can simply defragment and optimize your computer. This will take a long time (~5 hours), but you dont have to do any manual labor, and in the end your computer will be beautifully defragmented: all the free space will be clumped together in one big section of your hard drive and it will be completely continuous, so you can make a much larger partition (depending how much free space you have to begin with).

Boot camp with xp -- couldn't connect to the internet when installed

I need to run xp for my job because the software they use only works with windows. So I tried installing the copy of XY I have, XP Professional, last night. I used the same XP disk for my first mac a few years ago, a 24" iMac with Leopard. I am now trying this on my MB pro with snow leopard. It has the same processor as my first mac (a duo-core, I bought a refurbished mb pro).
Everything went fine until I tried to access the Internet to get any updates and download the software needed. I was not able to connect to the Internet at all. I tried setting it up, etc, but nothing worked. It could not connect, even though there seemed to be an icon that sad the signal was there (the two little computer monitors in the lower right of the taskbar)
I called my ISP to see of there was anyone on that end who might know what was going on, but nothing. He told me that my version of Internet Explorer was old and I neede the newest one (this copy of XP was from 2002 and the original version was IE 6), at which point I asked him how I was supposed to do that when I couldn't connect to the net. Anyway, he gave me the number for some company called plumchoice, and they couldn't help me because I was using boot camp, and I was told that they don't support that platform. I thought that was nonsense, given that I was running windows, not OSX and it worked before.
When I did this a few years ago it worked fine -- I could get on the net with no problem, and even then I think that there was a new version of IE that I had to upgrade to, yet I could access the Internet fine. I thougt I needed to download some things from the internet to complete the installation (from the window that came up when you start boot camp assistant) but it couldn't find anything, so I chose the second option that says I have the necessary disks that came with the computer.
So does anyone know what may be going on? I would also like to mention that I didn't yet go ahead and install the OS X drivers when I tried this, but I didn't think thay would make any difference -- I thought that they were just for the keyboard and volume controls, etc. If I need to do that, then I feel like a real idiot and you all deserve to laugh at me.
I'm not sure which disk that came with the machine is the one I'm supposed to use, so can anyone tell me that as well? It's been a while since I did this (2008). I should be able to use this OS (and I only need it to download some software and work within it for this job).

You need to install the drivers, especially the ones for your network hardware.

Yosemite, Boot Camp, Windows 8.1 - Resizing Partition Guide

Hey everyone, I had some success with this so I thought I would share:
What you Need:
0) familiarity with the command line, HD partitioning, linux, and lots of nerve.
1) Yosemite
2) A successful installation of Windows via Boot Camp (I was using 8.1 and I did the installation after I upgraded to Yosemite, i.e., I did not have a Boot Camp partition before upgrading to Yosemite) <-- Any other type of config may not work with this guide!!
3) A Linux live usb/cd with gparted (I assume you're familiar with linux and gparted and things like that, I'm not going to go into too many details on how to use that OS or its tools)
4) patience and luck
Disclaimer: This can really screw up your system if you fail to follow the directions or you have made the storage gods angry... use at your own risk!
So initially I created a boot camp partition to install Windows 8.1 and after the installation realized I should have allocated more space for Windows. On the OS X side, I opened the graphical diskutil and discovered I could not resize or change either of the partitions - the only thing I could do was delete the boot camp partition which was not a handy option considering the time I put into installing Windows and its subsequent updates.
After some careful googling I found this:
http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/134498/unable-to-resize-partitions
Which led me to the solution. From a terminal run: 'diskutil corestorage list' (without the quotes) to get a list of the logical volumes, groups, and physical disks that OS X created after using boot camp. The information you will need is the UUID of the logical volume (not the logical volume group or family). You are then going to use the undocumented command 'diskutil corestorage resizeStack' with the UUID of the logical volume in order to change the size of the volumes and physical disk. In my case, I wanted to shrink my remaining OS X partition by 40GB and give that to Windows. Again from the terminal run:
'diskutil corestorage resizeStack UUID XXXg' where UUID is the 32 digit identifier of the logical volume and XXX is the desired new size of the disk (e.g., 350g for 350 GB).
After a few moments, it will finish and in diskutil you should see an amount of unallocated space. You still can't do anything with it here, but at least it's visible. Reboot into OS X again just to feel confident that you haven't screwed anything up, yet. It did seem to take slightly longer to reboot into OS X this one time, but everything turned out ok
Now using a linux live usb drive, boot into your favorite brand of linux and run gparted. You should see your unallocated space sandwiched between your OS X partition (which gparted may or may not formally 'see') and the NTFS Windows partition. Simply move the Windows partition over to occupy the unallocated space and extend it to the end of drive and you're done. My version of gparted warned me that Windows may not boot after I do this, but for me, it worked fine and booted into Windows properly the first time. If Windows doesn't boot, you'll need a Windows install on a usb stick (you should have one from your boot camp installation right?) and then you'll need to repair the disk (there are many helpful guides that go through this very thing - just google it).
It worked for me flawlessly, good luck!

ashtastic wrote:
Now using a linux live usb drive, boot into your favorite brand of linux and run gparted. You should see your unallocated space sandwiched between your OS X partition (which gparted may or may not formally 'see') and the NTFS Windows partition. Simply move the Windows partition over to occupy the unallocated space and extend it to the end of drive and you're done.
Everything has worked so far, I have freed up about 75GB that is in between OSX and my 8.1 Bootcamp Partition, however I can't for the life of me seem to make a working Linux USB. How can you make a BOOTABLE (from this retina macbook pro) Live CD with Gparted. What tools/ISO did you use?

Boot camp can't view Mac partition

Hi guys. So heres my problem. I have a late 2012 27" Imac with a 3TB fusion drive, and I have boot camp successfully installed with Windows 8 (currently).
So my problem is when i'm booted into Windows, I cannot view my Mac partition at all. From what I understand, Apple have included HFS drivers which should enable me to at least view my Mac HDD when booted into windows, and the drivers are installed properly, however I still cannot even see my Mac HDD.
I have searched far and wide for possible solutions or even an explination as to why this isn't working for me, with no prevail. From what I understand, I think it might be the fusion drive which is preventing the reading capability. All I know is that i've tried almost everything (MacDrive etc.) and nothing works for me, I just ultimately want to be able to access my Mac HDD when im booted into Windows.
I have also tried on Windows 7 but I end up with the same problem.
CAN SOMEONE PLEASE HELP! THIS IS DRIVING ME CRAZY!
Thanks guys, any help will be appreciated!

I believe that you have already answered your own question without realizing it.
You indicated that yoru MacOS partition is on a Fusion Drive. If that is the case, then I do not believe that it is supported by Boot Camp, and you won't be able to access it. If you double check teh Boot Camp documentation, I believe it should clarify that. Fusion Drives are new technology from Apple (within the last year or so) and the technology is not really available to third parties yet, so other drivers like MacDrive, or HFS+ For Windows from Paragon won't have the ability to access the Fustion Drive until they either license the technology from Apple, ot attempt to reverse engineer it for themselves...

Need help with Boot camp assistant!!! (partitioning disk)

when i click partition disk in boot camp asistan after 5 minuts this message appears:
*+Verification failed. This disk could not be partitioned.+*
+Use Disk Utility to repair this disk.+
anyone know how to fix this??
i really want bootcamp!

Yes. Your directory is damaged and needs to be repaired. Boot up to your original gray iMac install Disk but instead of going through the install process, after you select the language go up to the top under the Utilities Menu and open Disk Utility. Select your hard drive on the left hand side and under the First Aid tab click Repair Disk.
George

Boot Camp - Which Windows XP? Partition size?

A long fan of Mac's, I'm now going to use a new iMac primarily as a Windows computer using Boot Camp for my office which uses Windows-only software.
1. Which versions of Windows XP Pro are compatible? Windows XP Professional x64 Edition? Microsoft Windows XP Professional with SP2? All of them?
2. How much partition space should I leave for OS X with a 1 TB hard drive if I will use that for browsing, iChat, Dreamweaver, and Photoshop?
Thanks.

From experience I have 4gb installed and XP 32bit only recognises 3gb on my macbook, although it is generally between 2.75~3.5gb for any system, depending on the devices installed, motherboard's chipset & BIOS. This is because of the IO reservations overlaying the physical address space and mask out those physical addresses so that it cannot be used for working memory (i.e. your PCI may use 0.5gb, thus your windows in bootcamp only shows 3.5gb ram available).
As for 32 and 64 bit XP, go 32bit as there is little support for 64bit applications. Use macdrive on windows and get the NTFS kernal hack to allow you to write to NTFS partitions. That way you can read/write to your windows partition from mac and read/write to your mac partition from windows. Although I would suggest getting two smaller hard drives, or a couple of them and not partitioning (use 1 for mac OS and applications, 1 for windows + apps and 1 could be a backup).
Message was edited by: swilso

Re: Installing WinXP Pro SP2 / Boot Camp - Drive Bay 2 - which partition?

I am stuck and I can't seem to find the answer through Google searches.
I have a Mac Pro and I am working on installing WinXP Pro SP2 on a second SATA drive. It is a 500gb drive by Western Digital and it happens to be the same size as the Mac OSX drive - 500gb.
Because they are alike in size I can't tell which is which in the installer. Here are my options:
476938mb Drive
H: Partition 1 (Unknown) - 476938 free
476938mb Drive
I: Partition 1 (Unknown) - 200mb free
C: Partion 2 (Unknown) - 476938 free
My guess is to install WinXP on the H: partition and I just want to confirm this as I don't really wish to wipe out my MacOS on the drive in Bay 1.
Can anyone confirm this? I wished this was addressed in the Boot Camp Installation Guide. They only address one drive that is partitioned, not two seperate drives. Also nothing listed shows up with the label BOOTCAMP.
Thanks in advance.
Rob

Pull your OS X drive.
XP and Vista 32-bit only give you 1.9GB of RAM.
If you don't need native access or 3D you might just want to later use it with Fusion, VirtualBox or Parallels.
Apple uses GPT (GUID) which creates those small 200MB and 128MB partitions you see that are essential.
For me, I would just format the drive as MBR, and FAT/MSDOS or if you have NTFS from MacFUSE or Paragon, format as NTFS (preferable), and pull OS X and then install.

Boot camp does not format the partition for Windows 7

I recently purchased a copy of windows 7. This is the full version. I downloaded the drivers to a usb drive then placed the windows 7 disk in my apple optical drive to partition to disk. After portioning the iMac restarts and gives the a blank screen with _ blinking. It seems as though the windows partition has not been formatted. I cannot enter a dos command such as format or anything else. If I start up the mac again with the windows 7 disk in the optical drive I will be prompted to insert a bootable disk. I understand that after the partitioning takes place that bootcamp should start the installation process. By the way after working on this for quite a long time I decided it might be the copy of windows so I returned it and got another. Same resuts. I hope someone can help.
Thanks

Read the instructions and it is pretty clear that you format to NTFS where you see the BOOTCAMP partition.
All the articles and how to are here:
http://www.apple.com/support/bootcamp
Boot Camp 101

Boot camp said it couldn't partition, so i am backing up as it suggested

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