[Reign]

I am a fool for messing around with settings without looking up how to do things properly. I just installed Windows on my Macbook today using Bootcamp and partitioned 20GB for it. That left me with roughly 120GB for my Mac volume. I was looking for a way to partition the Mac volume to 80GB to use and 40GB to share with the Windows volume as a FAT32 drive. Basically, to partition a drive to drop files into to share between the operating systems.

Without knowing how, I went into Disk Utility and then saw a "Partition" tab. I went there and discovered that I could resize the Mac (Startup) volume. The Mac volume was about 40GB used and 80 free. I resized it to about 80GB (40GB used + 40 GB free) and left the rest this grey color, hoping that it would magically turn into a partition. I clicked "Apply." This was taking a while and I got nervous. I aborted it by closing Disk Utility. Now I have a Mac volume that is 97.GB used and 30.3GB free.

How do I get it back?

I am running OS X 10.5.6.

The Capacity, Used, Available space do not all add up.

Code:
Filesystem    1G-blocks Used Available Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/disk0s2         79   49        30    63%    /
devfs                 0    0         0   100%    /dev
fdesc                 0    0         0   100%    /dev
map -hosts            0    0         0   100%    /net
map auto_home         0    0         0   100%    /home
/dev/disk0s3         20    4        16    23%    /Volumes/WINDOWS HD
/dev/disk1s3          7    7         0   100%    /Volumes/Mac OS X Install DVD

[Art Vandelay]

What you should have done is resize the Mac volume then hit the + button to add a new volume to the unused space. What does the partition map show in Disk Utility now?

[Art Vandelay]

Oh, don't ever quit any disk utility while it's processing something. You're just asking for a world of hurt.

[Reign]

Thanks for your help, Art.

I resized it and clicked "Apply". I took a snapshot, shown below. Doesn't resolve the problem and the computer still doesn't know that I have that much free space available. I tried doing what you just described but got an error message:

"Partition failed with the error:
Filesystem verify or repair failed."

[Art Vandelay]

Boot from your OS X DVD and run disk first aid from there. Make sure to choose the disk and not just one of the volumes.

[Reign]

Thanks for your help. I booted from the Startup DVD and repaired all volumes and disks and the space issue was not resolved. However, I did as you described above - resized the startup volume, clicked + to add a new volume, and partitioned again. I figured that if the problem before was that it didn't get to finish what it started because I interrupted it, then I'd tell it to start again. This fixed the problem and now I have a FAT volume to share with my Windows partition (I think. I have to test it.)

[Art Vandelay]

Good to hear that it's hopefully fixed. A borked partition map is not a good thing to have. Honestly, I'm amazed that you were able to recover from it. I'd have expected it would have been necessary to backup everything and wipe the drive to fix it.

[Reign]

Despite my lack in common sense (closing the Disk Utility while it was actively running a process), I persevere through adversity with my stubbornness.

So as it turns out, I cannot run Windows Bootcamp if I with third partition with a Fat filing system. I'm not sure if it would have made a difference if I configured it as Macintosh (Journaled). Its purpose was to be a drive to share between the two operating systems. I have read some comments about not being able to run Windows with external drives connected via firewire, regardless of whether they are FAT or Macintosh file systems. I suppose a third partition is being treated as an external drive and Bootcamp gets confused. I might try later to reinstall Windows as NTFS and see if that makes any difference. My school wanted to install FAT32 as the filing system because they know that Examsoft will run without a problem. After finals are over, I'm reinstalling and creating a larger NTFS partition if I cannot make that third one work.

So I removed the third partition and now I'm back to 2. No problems. All space accounted for.

[Simon]

For Bootcamp you should not try to set up partitions by yourself with Disk Utility. The idea is to let Bootcamp Assistant handle the partitioning part for you.

[Art Vandelay]

The OP did. The problems began when a 3rd partition was attempted to be added.

[King Bob On The Cob]

Not that it will help, but you should probably just install MacFUSE and ntfs-3g so you can directly modify files on your Windows partition (You won't be able to select it as a startup disk from System Preferences, but you'll be able to restart with option held down and boot from it anyways).