[bahia]

Hi everyone,
I urgently need to install Windows XP on my macbook, to work with some windows files.
The problem is that Boot Camp crashes (kernel panic) each time it attemps to create the additional partition. Then I have to boot from the Leopard DVD and repair the disk to get back on track.

I've looking around in other forums but it seems to be a 10.5.2 problem, and so far no one seems to have the solution..
My question is:
Should I just get Parallels or VM Fusion and not using Boot Camp for now?
Many thanks!

[ghporter]

Saying you get a kernel panic is only half the information-what message do you get with this kernel panic? That's going to tell us what's going on.

[bahia]

It just crashes..It says to hold down the power button and restart.

[bahia]

here's a link to a thread about that. many people have the same problem..

thanks!

Apple - Support - Discussions - BootCamp crashes computer when ...

[ghporter]

It's important to note that many Macs come from the factory with pretty badly fragmented free space, which hurts a lot of people's attempts at using Boot Camp. It's quite possible that there's some gray zone between "not enough contiguous free space", which causes BC to exit with an error message, and "plenty of contiguous free space to work with", which allows BC to do its thing.

The usual way to deal with the "not enough" problem is to somehow defragment your drive, both files (which are usually in pretty good shape) AND your free space. Note that defragmented files could be strewn all over the disk-you need to "compact" them as well, so that the free space isn't littered with files. I don't know if either DiskWarrior or iDefrag actually pay attention to free space as such because I've never tried them.

[bahia]

Thanks for your answer.
I guess that to defrag my HD I have to erase it first right?

[naphtali]

Thought Mac OS X did pretty well on the fragmentation part? Doesn't sound too good that users have to go through all that :/ Might it help to zero the free space / entire hard drive?

[turtle777]

Do you have an external FW HD that you can use to clne your current drive ?
If you use CCC (Carbon Copy Cloner) to clone a HD, it will be automatically defraged in the process of creating the copy.

So do a cop TO the external FW, test it, and if it worked, do a clone back on your Mac.
I would also partition the Mac drive before doing the second cloning operation, but I'm not sure how exactly Bootcamp needs it to be.

-t

[ghporter]

As I said, OS X does a very good job defragmenting files. That does not mean it even bothers with free space, which is the vital issue at hand. Zeroing the free space won't do jack for you in this case-it won't consolidate it at all, but rather just write zeros over that space.

Turtle's point is excellent. CCC is good about consolidating all your files when it restores an image, and that necessarily means it will leave the free space consolidated too.

And I'd still leave the partitioning to Boot Camp. If it doesn't work after all this consolidation, THEN try to set up the needed partition with Drive Utility using FAT32. Once you get into the Windows installer you can have the installer reformat the partition as NTFS, which is preferable by a mile for any OS installation.

[bahia]

Hi, I fixed my problem using a third party software called iDefrag.
Perfetc!
Thanks again!

[ghporter]

Thought it would help. Glad it did.