[wake266]

when i installed boot camp on my macbook, i partitionend my hard drive just as you should.
the windows os data got destroyed, in whole or in part. Now i want to restore my disk back to one single drive. from what i understand from the directions i use the boot camp assistant to to this. it comes up saying your startup disk cannot be partitioned or restored to a single partition. what now?

[mfbernstein]

I had a similar problem. I ended up resorting to iPartition ($45).

If you have a bootable external drive, you can backup and wipe the drive, or if you're comfortable with the terminal, there appears to be a solution using the gpt command.

[alain_30_alain]

Man, I have the same problem on my brand new MacBook Pro...

I've just installed Windows XP Home SP2 with BootCamp, and I partitionned a 10GB space for Windows' Partition, but now I realized that I don't have enought space, so now I want to erase everything and start it over but I dont know how...

[ghporter]

Boot your Mac from its OS X disc and run Disk Utility from the Tools menu. This should fix any glitches in the drive's partitioning data and allow you to then use Boot Camp to restore the drive to a single partition.

I would strongly advise to back up your Mac data before you do anything. Having a current backup will make things much easier if there's a problem with the drive that Disk Utility cannot fix and you wind up having to start from scratch.

[arcticblue]

I registered just to warn any future readers about Disk Utility. Don't do what I did and use the Disk Utility from the OSX install disc to restore your partitions. It will erase everything! I did this a few months ago and now I am having the same problem again. I was thinking my Ubuntu Live CD might help me out, but no luck so far. There's got to be a freeware solution to this (my only pet peev about Mac is how some people want you to pay for simple programs when there is a freeware alternative on other OSes)

[Cold Warrior]

Originally Posted by arcticblue 

Don't do what I did and use the Disk Utility from the OSX install disc to restore your partitions. It will erase everything!

Duh. Partioning erases all your data. This is completely normal doing it the way you did, and the utility makes this very clear. You should have used disk utility to repair your drive, then the Boot Camp utility to restore your 2 partitions into a single Mac volume.

[peeb]

I don't know of a free tool on the pc that non-destructively resizes partitions - Partition Magic will do this, but that costs money.

[vtboyarc]

open bootcamp assistant. click on "restore the startup disk to a single volume"
it will totally erase windows, and remove the partioned part of the HD, adding it back to Mac OS.
Then open booctamp, and partition more space. I did 32GB.

[ghporter]

Originally Posted by peeb 

I don't know of a free tool on the pc that non-destructively resizes partitions - Partition Magic will do this, but that costs money.

There's also no guarantee that it won't mess up the OS X partition while it's at it. I really LIKE Partition Magic, but I wouldn't use it on a Mac running Windows via Boot Camp-unless I never wanted to run OS X again. MUCH too dangerous.

[arcticblue]

OK, using disk utility to repair the drive and then using Boot Camp to re-partition doesn't work (at least for me). I had installed Windows through Boot Camp, but then got tired of it and installed Ubuntu. Everything worked fine, but now I want Windows back (my MBP can't boot Windows from USB... I spent 2 days trying and followed every guide I could find) for a game I'm trying to play. Boot Camp absolutely refused to let me do anything.

Here's how I fixed it... I downloaded the latest Ubuntu Gutsy (7.10) live CD and used the partition manager built in to that. I deleted my Ext3 and swap partitions and added an NTFS partition. It seems as though it will also allow resizing and moving of HFS+ partitions also, but I didn't need to resize anything(when I tried a few months ago, it wouldn't let me do this at all). Booted back to the Mac to try to run Boot Camp, but again it refused (I guess if the partition table has been changed in any way, it won't run). Well, I went ahead and tried to install Windows anyway and to my surprise, everything worked fine!

Now, you might be asking "Since you didn't need to resize, why didn't you just delete the Linux partitions from the Windows installer and create your NTFS partition from there?" I tried doing that, but it doesn't work. It will delete the partitions and copy files, but when you reboot, it will give an error that says HAL.DLL is missing and needs to be re-installed. What I think is happening is that the Windows installer doesn't handle the partition table correctly on the Mac and when you reboot, it get's confused. When I booted the Ubuntu live CD and ran the partition manager, it still showed my Linux partitions even though I had already deleted them in the Windows installer.

Hope this helps anyone who reads it. I would strongly suggest downloading the Ubuntu Gutsy (7.10) live CD. Not only does it load quicker than the OSX install disc (and boot a fully usable desktop), but it has read/write support for NTFS, read/write for non-journaled HFS, and read-only support for journaled HFS. Very useful for any sort of data recovery.

[shinykaro]

I kept meaning to un-partition and now my Boot Camp beta has expired. What can I do to get rid of my WIndows partition?

[ghporter]

Originally Posted by shinykaro 

I kept meaning to un-partition and now my Boot Camp beta has expired. What can I do to get rid of my WIndows partition?

Do what it says on the Boot Camp Beta site-download the latest version of Boot Camp and install it. Only the early versions expire; 1.4 does NOT expire. And if you want to dump the partition, use the utility from 1.4. When everything is all done and all is well, just uninstall BC 1.4.