Boot Camp fails to create a Windows partition because it can't move files

Posted by Jens Bannmann on Super User See other posts from Super User or by Jens Bannmann
Published on 2009-12-03T17:41:53Z Indexed on 2010/05/01 18:39 UTC
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Filed under:

bootcamp

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mac

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osx

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osx-snow-leopard

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defragment

I'm running Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) on a mac with a 320 GB drive, 167GB free space, and I can't get Boot Camp running. The wizard starts creating the Windows partition, but fails with a message claiming it cannot move some files. The message suggests to back up my hard disk, reformat it, restore my files, and re-run Boot Camp wizard.

The problem is: Though I do have backups (Time Machine), I don't feel like formatting my hard disk right now :-)

I found a thread in some forum discussing this problem. The suggestion was to defragment my volume with iDefrag, and lots of people claimed that solved the issue. So I went ahead and got iDefrag 1.7.1, created a bootable DVD and chose the "compact" setting recommended before partitioning - but still no luck with Boot Camp! So how do I get this working?

Fun note: last year, I briefly set up Boot Camp with 10.5, and it worked perfectly. Probably I did not use that much hard disk space back then...

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