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mattxmiggz · Jul 15, 2008, 08:44 PM

I installed a windows partition back when boot camp was in it's beta stage on my intel iMac. ( the first generation of intel imacs) After about 3 months I stopped using it and the beta had expired so there was no way I could restore the partition back into one hard drive. When I heard that leopard was releasing with a full version of boot camp I was very excited because I figured this meant I could get rid of my partition. This is not the case at all.

Everytime I open boot camp assistant to attempt to delete the windows partition I get as far as the second screen and this pops up.

"The startup disk cannot be partitioned or restored to a single partition. The startup disk must be formatted as a single Mac OS Extended (Journaled) volume or already partitioned by Boot Camp Asisstant for installing windows."
Again I am trying to delete the partition and restore it to one, not install a new one.

Does anyone have any clue what is going on here? I've tried everything from tech tools, Ive gone to disk utilities through the OS CD. I've tried just about every single way and I can't figure it out.

Please help me out.

64stang06 · Jul 15, 2008, 09:19 PM

Nothing you're doing wrong. You just have to bite the bullet and start over again, formatting the HDD to one partition then installing OS X again. Now, I have NO experience with live partitioning and such, but I don't believe that would help in this case.

mattxmiggz · Jul 15, 2008, 09:43 PM

Hmm I haven't formatted the hard drive. Any link to show me how?

ghporter · Jul 16, 2008, 07:34 AM

Have you tried resetting your system clock to some time before 12/31/2007 and running Boot Camp Assistant again? Since it seems to simply check the date of your system, it should think it's not expired and undo the partitioning. It's a good possibility that will solve your problem completely, it's easy to do and it can't hurt anything.

mattxmiggz · Jul 16, 2008, 09:08 AM

it isn't saying it's expired, it opens fine.

it just won't let me passed the first page, the pop up with the error shows up. (see first post)

Person Man · Jul 16, 2008, 10:22 AM

If you have an external hard drive laying around, you can use Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper! (the unregistered version does basic drive cloning for free) to clone your Mac OS X partition, then reformat the drive to one partition using Disk Utility, and then clone the drive back to the new partition. That will save you from having to reinstall everything after reformatting.

64stang06 · Jul 16, 2008, 11:56 AM

Once you boot from the Leopard disc, go to Utilities-->Disk Utility. On the left side, click on the first hard drive icon (should have numbers and a name). On the right side, you'll see a tab called Partition. Click on that. When you see Volume Scheme, there's a pop up menu that should appear. Click on it, and select One Partition. Give it a name and hit the apply button. Once that is done, you'll have one partition now. Close out Disk Utility and then continue with the install for Leopard.

ghporter · Jul 16, 2008, 07:30 PM

Originally Posted by mattxmiggz

it isn't saying it's expired, it opens fine.

it just won't let me passed the first page, the pop up with the error shows up. (see first post)

My mistake; I misread your post. It sounds like there's a problem that Disk Utility can and should fix. Run from the Leopard install disc, of course; it's a "hard drive" issue rather than a volume issue. See the info others posted and see how far that gets you.