Boot camp assistant says "not enough space" with 35GB available!

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Boot camp assistant says "not enough space" with 35GB available!

I have recently cleared space on my hard drive to accomodate a 64bit Windows 7 partition, which I wanted to make with boot camp assistant.

I made absolutely sure I had plenty of space; in fact, I have no less than 35 GB of space available on my startup disk. HOWEVER, the amount of space on my hard drive seems to be constantly changing. I believe this is due to time machine's hidden background backups which automatically fill up an expandable partition entitled "mobilebackups".

Boot camp assistant constantly gives me the following error: "The startup disk does not have enough space to be partitioned. You must have at least 10 GB of free space available."

This is on a 2.2GHz 15" SR MacBook Pro 2007 with 6GB RAM. I am running 10.7.1 (LION). Perhaps this has something to do with the recovery disk or the mobilebackps partition being treated as one or more separate partitions, as boot camp will only partition a drive with a single partition. However, I have not heard of this error anywhere else.

Thanks for your help in advance! I am a rather experienced user, so feel free to use advanced terminoligy if you wish.

PS Attached are screenshots of the error message and of my HD's info (free space highlighted)

MacBook Pro (2007), Mac OS X (10.7.1), 2.2GHz, 6GB RAM

Posted on Aug 30, 2011 7:28 PM

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Answer 1

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ScuseMe

Level 2

222 points

Aug 30, 2011 8:03 PM in response to ahanuban

Boot Camp Assistant needs *contiguous* free space, not just any old space.

Normally I'd suggest iDefrag to defrag your disk before running Boot Camp Assistant again (iDefrag worked great on my 2007 MBP), but iDefrag is not Lion compliant yet. In that case, the only way to get enough contiguous space is the old fashioned way - backup, format, restore.

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Answer 2

ahanuban Author

Level 1

0 points

Aug 30, 2011 9:15 PM in response to ScuseMe

Thank you very much. I thought this might be the case, but due to apple's incorporation of the ability to create a fragmented partition in disk utility I assumed that that wasn't what the problem was. However, I'll just wipe and restore as I have done for defragmenting in the past, and we'll see how that goes.

One last thing: an apple support document for lion mentioned bootcamp 4.1. Does this even exist yet, and if so, how can I upgrade if it is compatible with my Mac?

Thanks again.

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Answer 3

Jaygyver

Level 3

739 points

Aug 30, 2011 10:48 PM in response to ahanuban

If you are running Lion now it will show up in the Sortware Update just like any other update.

Boot Camp 4.0 and above is only useable/available in Lion.

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Answer 4

ahanuban Author

Level 1

0 points

Aug 31, 2011 2:16 AM in response to Jaygyver

Hello,

I am already running bootcamp 4.0. I was wondering if anyone knew about bootcamp 4.1, which is discussed in a lion support document.

I am currently attempting to repartition, and will report how it goes.

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Answer 5

ahanuban Author

Level 1

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Aug 31, 2011 3:13 AM in response to Jaygyver

After restoring, I lost my Recovery HD partition. I am currently working to get a new one. Perhaps I will install it AFTER boot camp is finished, which might solve the multiple-partitions error? I could use some advice here.

At this point, bootcamp is giving me a new error which says some files cannot be moved. I am moving this to a new discussion HERE:

http://discussions.apple.com/thread/3298756

Thanks for your help! Please respond to my new thread if you think you can contribute.

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