[mattxmiggz]

Ok..
This problem has been going on for a year and I stopped bothering with it for quite some time, but now it's really effecting me so it needs to get fixed.
I think it was 2005? (not sure) when boot camp beta released. I downloaded it and partitioned 25 gigs for windows and the rest for mac (120gb HD by the way). I have not used the windows in a year and have desperately been trying to restore my hard drive to the original partition and format. I try to do this through boot camp assistant, but I can't even get to the second window of boot camp assistant because I get this message...

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 Assistant for installing Windows.

I have tried many times to wipe my HD in disk utilities to as it says above but no such luck.
I am officially stuck and puzzled and don't know where to turn next.. I need those 25 gigs!

Thanks,
Matt

[ghporter]

The reason you're having problems is that the version of Boot Camp you used to set up your Windows partition "expired" and you can't (easily) use it to remove that partition. You could set your system clock back to some time in 2005 and then use the old Boot Camp Utility to delete the partition-unless the partition table has become corrupt for one reason or another (repeated tries to delete that partition, Windows itself, etc.).

In that case, use Carbon Copy Cloner or other, similar tool to back up your OS X partition. Now boot off your Leopard DVD and use Disk Utility (under "Tools) to repartition it to a single HFS+ (OS X native) partition. Then restore your OS X backup. A pain in the rear, no doubt about it, but that will fix the issue. The reason you couldn't mess with the startup disk before was that you were using Disk Utility from OS X, but it can't do that because you're running the OS from that disk... Using Disk Utility from the Leopard DVD will do the trick.