[bmwk100]

Greetings,

I am attempting to partition my drive via Boot Camp and receive the following message:
Back up the disk and use Disk Utility to format it as a single Mac OS Extended (Journaled) volume. Restore your information to the disk and try using Boot Camp Assistant again.

Does anybody know what I need to do? I have 18gb of free memory and am attempting to utilize 10GB for Windows XP.

[ghporter]

Do exactly what the message says. The message means that something has messed up the partition table and so Boot Camp Assistant can't change the partition settings.

Use Disk Utility to back up your OS X installation and save it somewhere OFF YOUR HARD DRIVE, preferably to an external hard drive because that will be large enough and pretty fast. Next, boot from your OS X install disc and instead of starting an installation, choose Disk Utility from the Tools menu. Have DU format the entire drive as a Mac OS Extended (Journaled) volume. Now restore your back up and make sure everything is running. Once you've done all of that, you can use Boot Camp Assistant to create your Windows (or whatever other OS) partition.

This will also prevent something that a lot of people run into: not enough consolidated free space on the drive. When you restore the backup, you'll basically write the whole thing contiguously (or close enough, anyway), so almost all of your free space will be contiguous. Very handy thing to have.

[bmwk100]

Thanks Glenn-
I'm not that great with computers?

How do you back up from Disk Utility? I have an external hard drive.

How do you boot from OSX install disk?

Thanks in advance.

[Simon]

Originally Posted by bmwk100 

How do you back up from Disk Utility? I have an external hard drive.

1) connect external disk
2) launch /Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility, go to the Restore tab
3) drag internal disk to 'source', drag external disk to 'destination'
4) select erase destination (make sure nothing important is left on the external disk first!)
5) hit restore button (that will then clone your internal disk onto the eternal disk)

How do you boot from OSX install disk?

Several options:
• insert OS X install DVD, reboot, hold c
• insert OS X install DVD, reboot, hold alt/opt and chose DVD from boot loader selection
• insert OS X install DVD, select it from System Preferences > Startup Disk, reboot
and several others, but those should be enough for now.

[ibook_steve]

Also, a quick note: as a correction to your original message, you have 18GB of free hard disk space, not "free memory." Memory refers to RAM which, for now, people usually have only up to about a maximum of 8 GB (more in towers). But as memory capacity continues to increase, it will become more important than ever to correctly distinguish between memory and hard disk space.

Steve

[bmwk100]

Thanks for the help.