Boot Camp Assistant says "The disk cannot be partitioned because some files cannot be moved." What can I do?

What you are telling us is.... you never learned or know how to use a backup and backup program to actually do a restore.

Consolidating free space is not something built into Mac OS X.

Cloning your drive is the easy way. There is always TimeMachine. I take it you don't use that either.

Disk Utility has a tab "RESTORE" which will also 'clone' one drive to another and allow erase and restore.

Apple DU is not always the best method. You have a real issue and hung up on something.

RE: I really don't like the idea of putting all my data on an external hard drive just to have this done.

If you value you data you would definitely have an external drive backup. Don't be penny wise and pound foolish as Mr Murphy always visits at the most inopportune time.

Well, that's the reason to put your backup onto another drive is in case of emergency's or problems your facing now, it's to make sure your main HD has a backup in case when it dies. When it dies you have less then a 50/50 chance of being able to access the files again, and if so only a brief period of time, say one small file at a time before it dies again. And you would still need an external drive to get it from.

Here's most of the information you need for Time Machine. You learned how to use the Mac so you shouldn't have any problems learning one more thing, it's really not that hard, the trick is to read the manual and information a couple of times just to familiarize youself with everything it does.🙂

As far as WHY it gives the error is because at one time or another you filled your HD up, or close to it, and then deleted a bunch later. In the mean time the files get scattered all over the place. If a core file that is "anchored" is in the new partitioned area it can not be moved so you get the error. You either have to get a de-fragger application and de-fragg the HD, delete/reformat the HD and reinstall the OS new again then update everything all over again, or you can just erase/restore from a Time Machine backup (or any other backup program) and your good to go.

One thing you can try is to make the Windows partition slighlty smaller until you no longer get the error or until it gets too small of a partition.

Just installing OS updates and programs will

Write the installer

Uncompress the file at say 7x and write the actual installer in a free area that often may be anywhere but at the far end of the partition is common.

Write new version or copy of the files being changed/updated (myfile.new and myfile.old)

Delete the entry in the directory for the temp files and versions.

A program that can show your hard drive and where files are and where free space is, and show fragments.

OS X tries to eliminate small files with fragments when they are rewritten and when it can find contiguous free space to write the new file.

That can actually work against you, as it might fragment the free space also.

When a drive gets down to 20% free space there is a performance hit, you are using slower areas of the drive (inner tracks are usually 50% slower) and having more trouble finding filles and where to write files.

Clone Mac OS is one of the easiest and safest methods.

Click on source (Mac Harddrive), click on or drop the backup partition / drive into target icon.

Click "Run"

you end up with bootable (test it to be certain) exact copy.

Unplujg and keep it on a shelf

Update it before you inistall a new version etc of OS X or make changes.

Have two: one safe on the shelf from Week #1 and new Week #2

Disk Utility can do that.

With huge hard drives free space should not be an issue. The lack of a feature to defrag as part of Boot Camp or Disk Utility is why there are iDefrag and others, but they are slow and best run from.... a 2nd hard drive running OS X rather than from CD. and never great idea to do w/o backups or on live system.

You can't restore to the drive you are restoring from, clone your drive (carbon Copy Cloner or SuerDuper are easy and reliable), to an external, then boot to the external and erase the internal, then restore the external to the internal.

freelander87 wrote:

Why not boot from Apple's Time Machine back ups that are on my external hard drive? Is it not the same as a clone?

I know the method I suggested works, I do not use TM for any kind of backup so have no comment on your suggestion. 😐

If your looking for a defragger you might as pay a little more and get an application that does more, like TechToolPro or similar, it does maintenance and other stuff and now does the defrag. It helped me out more often then not, but i'm one of the lazy ones so some people stay on top of things and don't need it.

I think I read some where that you can't boot to a Time Machine back up? You can only restore.

Jaygyver wrote:

If your looking for a defragger you might as pay a little more and get an application that does more, like TechToolPro or similar, it does maintenance and other stuff and now does the defrag. It helped me out more often then not, but i'm one of the lazy ones so some people stay on top of things and don't need it.

I think I read some where that you can't boot to a Time Machine back up? You can only restore.

My experience is that defragging (whether with iDefrag, TechTool or some other) fails to resolve this issue more often than it succeeds.

bootable backups are in our universe called "clone" backups.

I was facing the same problem with my MacBook Pro. I used the following method and it resolved the issue. I hope that it works for you aswell.

1. Go to Disk Utility and erase free space on Macintosh HD (which took about two hours for me).

2. Restart your Mac and boot up by pressing CMD and R.

3. Choose Utilities, then Disk Utility in the menu and then Repair the HD.

4. Restart and then try partitioning using Boot Camp again.

Prob too late for OP but hope this will help someone facing a similar problem in future.

I found the easiest way to achieve the "defrag" of disk and subsequent successful installation of Win 7 simply by doing a complete restore from Time Machine. This process wipes the hard drive before restoring to the same hard drive, thus tidying up the non-contiguous areas on the drive which can prevent the creation of a new partition.

Obviously, this requires the user to have a fully backed up copy of his hard drive on Time Machine, as well as a boot disk.

I did this with an early 2009 MacBook (not Pro), running Mountain Lion with a Snow Leopard boot disk. Accordingly, I could only install the 32-bit version of Win7. If you don't have a boot disk, I believe you can create a legitimate one via Carbon Copy Cloner (30-day free download) if you purchased your OS via the Mac App Store, although I didn't need to try this step. No doubt there are other ways of achieving this.

Boot from OS disk and select Restore from Time Machine from the utilities menu. This took me about 40 minutes for 35GB of files, so this could take substantially longer if you have lots more data. But, hey, it's just a case of being patient.

Once this has been done, boot from your restored HDD as normal and use the BootCamp utility to create your new partition for Win7. Load your Win7 disk when appropriate and select the advanced options to format the new BootCamp partition with NTFS as is required for Windows OSes. Don't go looking for "NTFS" specifically as I don't remember even seeing it, just select Format and it will apply the correct formatting. (Clever Apple!)

Good luck!

Thank you for posting this. The instructions worked perfectly on my mid-2010 MacBook Pro partition problem.