[micmac95]

Hi

I am on a Macbook Pro that I bought through my school running Snow Leopard, and I am wanting to set up Boot Camp so I can dual-boot into Windows 7. The way the school has partitioned the Hard Drive is one partition for the OS, which is 60GB and one for the user files which is 100 GB.
When I ran Boot Camp Assistant I get the message "The startup disk cannot be partitioned or restored to a single partition."

I want to know if it is possible to create a third partition from my "User" partition to install my other OS, instead of the standard setup of one for Mac and one for Windows?

Thanks in advance

[sudowork]

How is the User partition formatted?

Here's one method, but I'm not sure if it works or not. That being the case, I offer no warranty on this method.

You could try booting into your install disk, resizing the partitions, make a new one, and then install off your Windows installation disk as you would a PC. See the link below for an anecdotal reference.
10.5: Create a three-partition Boot Camp setup - Mac OS X Hints

[micmac95]

Originally Posted by sudowork 

How is the User partition formatted?

Here's one method, but I'm not sure if it works or not. That being the case, I offer no warranty on this method.

You could try booting into your install disk, resizing the partitions, make a new one, and then install off your Windows installation disk as you would a PC. See the link below for an anecdotal reference.
10.5: Create a three-partition Boot Camp setup - Mac OS X Hints

My user partition is formatted in Mac OS Extended (Journaled).

The problem with that solution for me is that it involves re-installing OSX, which I can't do as it is a school imaged laptop.

Is there any way that I can do it by just shrinking my user partition and formatting it for windows?

[micmac95]

Would it be possible to set up my HDD like this, and then install Windows on the BOOTCAMP partition?

[Cold Warrior]

How to Triple-Boot Your Mac with Windows and Linux, No Boot Camp Required - Triple Boot - Lifehacker

[micmac95]

Would using rEFIt work if I shrink one of my partitions?

[sudowork]

Originally Posted by micmac95 

Would it be possible to set up my HDD like this, and then install Windows on the BOOTCAMP partition?

That's what I had in mind, but change the formatting of the partition to FAT32 or NTFS (you'll have to reformat that partition in the Windows installer later). I'm just not sure if it works because I haven't tried it myself. Perhaps someone else can chime in?

[micmac95]

Yeah, thats what I was thinking. But IF something goes wrong, can Time Machine restore the computer to exactly the way it was before?

If not, is there any other backup software that does this?

[dapitt]

Hi,

I have more or less the exact same situation. Have a 13" MBP on which I'm running Windows 7 on an NTFS partition using through Bootcamp, along side MacOS on the other partition.

Originally sized the w7 partition to 40GB which turned out to be a bit too little and now need to resize. Haveing researched, it seems both risky and humongsly complicated to resize an NTFS partition with Bootcamp.

So I was thinking that if I shrink the MacOS by 10-20GB, I should be able to format that new free space as an additional NTFS partition instead. Can than use that for basic storing from the main W7 partition.

OR?

Would really appreciate any comments and suggestions.

micmac95, if you come up with something, please post.