Boot camp on new macbook with 10.6

It is trying to tell you that it needs free space to be contiguous, no fragments.

Gets asked almost daily - less lately - for FOUR YRS now.

Consolidate, defrag, repair, backup, clone, even 'shrink' and reduce the size of your HFS partition and then stretch it back out.

but backup.

and boot from and use your latest DVD or another hard drive you boot from.

you also NEED Lion's Boot Camp 4.01+ drivers. A must really.

As for recovery partition, another reason to work from Lion.

You can do clean install of Lion to an external drive.

The Boot Camp 3.0.4 thru updates to 3.3 can and may work but not as well and not worth doing.

Even Lion would likely complain. The error message.... poorly written and misleading and not pointing to the real and fundamental issue. Failing grades for writing and being helpful.

If you want to get back to 10.6 without the 10.7 recovery partition there are at least two ways to do this.

Since you have a 10.6 clone you can start from this drive then wipe the current drive and then re clone 10.6 to it. No more recovery partition.

Another way is to:

1) Make the Recovery visible in Disk Utility by using a program like Secrets or MacPilot.

2) Highlite the Recovery partition and Control click it and select Mount the partition.

3) With the Recovery partition highlited, erase the partition, you'll get an error message, ignore it.

4) Now highlite the top identity of the hard drive and select the partition tab.

5) Highlite the Recovery partition and press the minus sign.

6) Click and hold on the bottom edge of the partition above and drag it to the bottom, if it doesn't go there automatically, the press apply.

Boot Camp is a one trick pony.

To get Windows, you can't have two OS X AND STILL use BCA and create Windows.

Follow inside the lines.

If you want three partitions, someone or two posted how they did that. Today. And I bookmarked the thread, so check my profile bookmarks.

Lion can always do net-install. Does no one read the tech support articles? guess not.

I miss the days of reference guides and manuals and when RTM was actually #1.

http://www.apple.com/support/bootcamp

http://www.apple.com/support/lion

You can clone (Carbon Copy is great) way.

You need disk drives and you can have Lion on external or internal or both.

Why do you want to stay with SL now? something not working with it and still need Rosetta?

Apple has an artricle you need to read:

Recovery Mode

As for the rest, you can have Lion on internal or external, external is nice and you can have that be for recovery, net install, and to download BC 4.0.

Having an extra partition on the same drive like you mentioned is not supported.

Requires extra steps.

10.6 can be on internal. 10.7 on external. Which is what I recommended you do. So you have Lion and Recovery and BC 4.x

Patrick, this may be too late for you .... but I've got my new (shipped with Lion) MacBook Pro up and running with boot partitions for 10.6, 10.7 and Windows 7 all living together happily. It all had to be done in the correct sequence, but after working that out it came together nicely. No recovery partition however. However, I created and have set aside a 10.7 installer DVD so no real need for the recovery partion anyway. If you are still working this problem post back.

Hi akjim2, I'm having this very same issue, too. Need SL for Quicken 2007, also need to be able to boot into Windows 7. Can you let me know how you did it?

Thanks so much.

I'm having a similar issue and came across this posting:

http://www.tech-recipes.com/rx/9839/how-to-manually-partition-boot-camp-your-mac -for-windows-7/

While it's written for a 10.6 installation, the recovery partition on my Lion system is disk0s3, so you should be able to follow te guide closely, adjusting for your volume size. I'm backing up now and will try in the morning.

There's nothing magic about BCA - it just makes installations easier most of the time, but it seems very finicky about what it validates before running the basic unix command to resize the disk. It seems much more protective of the disk than Disk Utility. While intimdating at first, the command line gives you much more flexibilty when the UI based tools won't work.

For this protocol you need your new MacBook Pro which came with Lion installed (late 2011) and an older Macintosh capable of booting off earlier version of 10.6 such as the Mid 2009 MacBook Pro which I am using to run this protocol.

For this I used: New MacBook Pro 2.2 Ghz; 500GB internal (New Mac); Mid 2009 MacBook Pro running 10.6.8 (Old Mac); Retail 10.6.3 Installation DVD; Downloaded Mac 10.6.8.1 Combo Updater; Windows 7 Ultimate Installation DVD; Firewire 800 cable; 16GB USB stick.

I don’t like Lion very much so far, so am only giving it a token 50 GB partition, just enough to keep it installed and up to date to see how it develops. I’ll mainly be working in 10.6.8 as several of the applications I use regularly are running fine in 10.6 and I don’t want to mess with uncertainty during the work week. I only use Windows for a couple of applications and don’t need much storage there. Therefore, 10.6 gets the majority of my HD space, Windows 30GB and Lion 50GB.

On the new Mac:

1. Follow the instructions near the end of this article to redownload a Lion installer. http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4718

The instructions are near the end of the article. Since your mac came with Lion the download is free. HOWEVER, watch your wallet as the App store may not honor this freebie. I noticed it tried to charge me and I had to escalate to senior staff at customer care to get it corrected back to free.

Create a 10.7 installation DVD or create an installer on a USB stick. The stick will be faster to use in the future. In addition, if the stick is large enough (16GB or better) you can partition the stick into three, use one for your 10.7 installer, one for a 10.6.8.1 installer and the last little one for the 10.7.2 combo updater and the 10.6.8 combo updater ... keeping these up to date as time passes.

2. Launch Boot Camp Assistant, download and burn the apple drivers to disk. You need the Windows 7 installer disk for this. If you have trouble with this it isn't a big deal .... Step 4 of the Boot Camp v4 Installation and Set-up Guide tells you how to get the drivers again.

3. Quit Boot Camp Assistant after downloading the drivers. You may burn them to disk now or do it later.

4. Eject the Windows disk.

5. Shut down the new Mac then start it up in Target Disk Mode (Hold down the “T” key right after poking the power button. Hold the “T” key down until you see the Firewire symbol floating around on the screen.

6. Plug in a firewire cable to the new mac, then into the old mac.

On the old Mac:

5. Launch Disk Utility and ERASE your new Mac, then quit disk utility.

6. Visit this URL for a more comprehensive description and background discussing the terminal commands that follow:

http://www.tech-recipes.com/rx/9839/how-to-manually-partition-boot-camp-your-mac -for-windows-7/

Launch Terminal

issue this command followed by a return:

diskutil list

This will provide you the addresses of the storage devices and partitions which exist on your old mac and the new mac and any other storage devices you have connected or DVD’s which you have inserted. It will look something like this, which is an example which has only two storage devices mounted:

Make note of the disk IDENTIFIER for the main disk of your New Mac. The example above shows only my Old Mac with an additional 16GB USB stick mounted on it. Note that my old Mac is disk0 in this example. Were my New Mac also mounted it would have a scheme beginning with disk2 if it were added to the example above.

So, assuming my new mac to be mounted and identified as disk2, then I issued the following command in Terminal:

diskutil partitiondisk /dev/disk2 3 MS-DOS WIN7 30G JHFS+ MAC10.7 50G JHFS+ MAC10.6.8 420G

Which resulted in the recently erased new mac (disk2) being partitioned into three partitions, the first visible partition being a 30GB MS-DOS (Fat 32) partition named “WIN7”, the second a 50GB GUID MacOSX Extended Journaled partition named “MAC10.7” and the third a 420GB GUID MacOSX Extended Journaled partition named “MAC10.6.8”. These are all now empty partitions, ready for use. Note: When you see these again they will be shifted numerically because the OS puts a small partition ahead of the ones which are visible. Also 10.7 will also add a small on to the MAC10.7 partition when you install Lion into that partition.

Using the Terminal command above, substitute YOUR new mac disk number for the 2 in my example. If you want more space for Windows 7 make that partition larger, others smaller as you wish. My example is a 500 GB drive being partitioned into three with one of those being intended for my Windows 7 installation.

7, After Terminal has successfully reported partitioning your new mac drive,

issue a list command again and take note of which partitions are which:

diskutil list

If you followed the same command structure I used in the example above the Windows partition is now number 2 on your new Mac.

After making your notes, quit terminal.

8. Eject your Target Disk and disconnect the cables between your new mac and your old mac.

9. Hold down the power button on your new mac to turn it off.

10. Get out your Windows 7 Installation DVD and slip it into your new mac as you restart it. The Windows 7 installer will boot, follow the instructions in the Apple Boot Camp version 4 guide to install Windows 7. Know the size and location of the partition you are going to install Windows 7 into. When you get to the phase of identifying the location to install Windows 7, be sure to chose the right one then follow the apple instructions to format that partition for Windows. The Windows 7 installer will change the format from Fat32 to NTSF, then you will continue with your installation.

11. After the Windows 7 installation completes, restart your computer and use the “option” key held down during start to allow selection of an alternate boot device.

12. Insert your 10.7 installation device ….. USB stick or DVD and wait for it to appear in the selection window. Choose it and continue the start-up.

13. Install 10.7 completely, then eject and remove the USB stick or DVD

14. Restart in Target Disk mode.

15. Reconnect your new mac to your old mac with the firewire cable.

16. If you have extracted a dmg of the Snow Leopard retail installer disk and put it onto your USB stick, insert the stick otherwise, insert the Snow Leopard installer DVD and run the 10.6 installer from whichever device you have inserted.

17. Chose your 10.6 partition on the new mac and install 10.6.3 from the retail source.

18. After 10.6 installation has completed, Restart from your old mac (Option key during reboot), continue restart from your old mac.

19. Run the 10.6.8.1 combo updater which you downloaded from apple on your new mac 10.6 installation.

20. After the combo update completes eject the target disk volumes and USB volumes and then disconnect the firewire cables.

21. Restart your new mac with option key down. Select your 10.6.8 startup partition and continue the start.

22. Re run the 10.6.8.1 combo updater natively on the new mac. Run disk utility and repair permissions. Run Software update and do any additional updates. Run disk utility and repair permissions again.

23. Re start, option key down … select the 10.7 installation and run the most recent combo updater on it. Right now that is 10.7.2. Run software update and do whatever updating comes to visit. Run disk utility and repair permissions.

24. Re start, option key down and boot into Windows. Update and set-up Windows, using the Windows Boot Camp to install your apple drivers from the drivers CD you previously created. Update Windows and Boot Camp again ….

Here is what diskutil shows on my new mac after all of this:

Whew …. Get back to work and enjoy your new Triple Boot MacBook Pro!

Hi akjim2,

I'm happy your strategy worked for you and don't know the particulars about your situation, but I'll share my experience today doing the same on a MacBook Pro. I believe you could have achieved your objective in fewer steps with one machine and it may be helpful to others.

1. I was able to divide my primary Lion disk into 3 partitions using Disk Utility. For the one you on which you intend to install Snow Leopard, choose Mac OS Extended (Journaled) as the format selection. For your Windows partition, choose MS-DOS for the format. Disk Utility will resize, subdivide and format the new disks, relocating any files occupying the area for the new partitions.

Total time: 10-15 minutes - not exactly sure as I was doing dishes.

Big Bonus: You don't have to re-install your primary OS, applications and files saving several hours.

Note: Sometimes Disk Utility fails during this process. A common reason for this is some sort of error in the boot record. Use Disk Utility to repair the disk. If it can't repair it when logged into Lion, restart you machine holding down the option key. Select the Recovery HD and run Disk Utility from there, targeting your Lion disk.

From here, install the additional OSs at your leisure. As you mentioned, Windows will say it can't install. Just hightlight your Windows partition and allow it to reformat it.

Perhaps there were conditions preventing this from working for you, but I found it to be a rather simple process.

glawky, I actually tried that which you describe earlier. It failed and Windows 7 format would not correct the trouble at the Boot Camp created partition which had been modified by re-partitioning the MacOSX partititon. Therefore, a new approach. More steps for sure ... but this proceedure overcame the problem created by Disk Utility during the re partition of the MacOSX partition.

Strange... Glad you found a workaround!