[sebastiano]

Hey Guys!
I was trying to install xp on my macbook, but bootcamp will not let me make a partition it says: "The disc can not be partitionated because some archives can not be moved. Make a security copy of the disc, and use Disc Utility to format it as a unit in formatted Mac OS - enlarged (journaled). Reform your informations on the disc, and try to use Boot Camp Assistant again"
I read an old thread with the same problem, and i have tried to reboot my macbook on the leopard innstall disc and opened disc utility from there and repaired my HD without luck. It still says the same when i try to make a partition. I would prefer to avoid backup my macbook and reinstall leopard.

What can i do?
Thanks in advance!
Sebastian

[kylef]

I spent hours trying to fix this a few nights ago, and tried everything you said a heck of a lot more. The reason you can't do it is because of OSX's defragmentation. You can either:

a) download a defragger and run it (will take quite a while, I'd recommend iDefrag from reading other reviews)
or
b) try random partition sizes to see if you get lucky (like I did in the end)

[ghporter]

You can also back up the whole OS X partition (use Disk Utility) and then restore it using the "wipe destination" option. That very effectively defrags the partition. It's somewhat time consuming and requires an external drive, but it works and it's simple. And free. Free is good.

[AKcrab]

Originally Posted by ghporter 

You can also back up the whole OS X partition (use Disk Utility) and then restore it using the "wipe destination" option. That very effectively defrags the partition.

I thought doing the restore with "erase destination" did a block copy. Wouldn't that carry fragmentation across?

[ghporter]

It's my understanding that it does not copy blank space to the image, and thus the image is more compact. I can't find anything authoritative on that at the moment though. This technique has been posted here on a number of occasions, and it seems to have worked for everyone who's tried it-at least they haven't come back saying that they still had the "no free space" problem afterward.

[dixona]

I'm suffering from the same problem - can't partition the hard drive to install bootcamp. Any chance you can give specific details of how to perform the 'disk utility' (aka free!) option.

I'm a bit green to all the OSX inner workings / jargon - generally not especially computer literate so please be gentle on the techie side!!

Thanks for your help.
Cheers, AD

[ghporter]

Dixona, welcome to our forums!

Use Disk Utility's own help to look up how to create a backup image of your hard drive. It should tell you in detail how to do exactly what you need to do, and in pretty much common English. You'll need some sort of external drive to save this image to and later restore it from.

Once you have the instructions, you'll have to put your OS X install disc into the drive and boot from it (restart while holding the 'C' key). Once the installer has started, go to the Tools menu and start Disk Utility. Tell it to back up your OS X partition (which should be the only one shown) to your external drive. Now here's the "interesting" part: before you can restore your backup, you now need to tell Disk Utility to erase the disk. The whole hard drive, not just a volume. Once you do that, tell DU to restore the backup, which should write everything more or less contiguously, so the free space on the drive will be much more consolidated.

I hope these outline instructions and what you get from DU's help will be more than adequate in fixing your problem.

[reader50]

To find Disk Utility's help, launch Disk Utility. Then you can reach the built-in help in one of two ways:

1. In the menu bar, choose "Help" on far right.
2. Press Command-?

These shortcuts are standardized across most Mac OS X applications.

[FastAMX79]

I had this problem as well. I ended up formatting the drive and restoring for a Time Machine backup. I even got back 5.8GB of disk space even though I was working from a backup I took right before starting my adventure