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Boot Camp failed on 3TB Fusion - 1TB gone missing

Just tried to install Windows using Boot Camp on the new 3TB supporting version.

It hung at the partitioning stage, and I was left with a messed up Disk Image and about 1.2TB less disk space than I had before. I tried a full restore via Recovery Assistant, but now Disk Utility seems to think I only have a 2TB disk.

I went back in to Recovery Assistant to try a reinstall, and it again showed Macintosh HD as a 2TB volume, so doesn't look like that will solve the problem either.

Any ideas? I'm outside of my 90 days tech support so thought I'd ask here before paying for a call.

iMac (27-inch, Late 2012), OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.3)

Posted on Mar 15, 2013 9:22 AM

Best reply

mende1

Level 10

93,538 points

Posted on Mar 15, 2013 9:26 AM

First of all, I doubt that the space has disappeared. Probably, Boot Camp resized your OS X partition but didn't create the Windows partition, so you have that "lost" space. To recover it, follow these steps:

1. Open Disk Utility and select the hard disk at the top of the sidebar.

2. Go to Partitions tab and you will see a bar similar to this:

3. As you can see, at the bottom right of "Macintosh HD" volume, you can select it, so put the cursor on it and drag it to the bottom of the sidebar. Finally, press Apply, and you will recover your lost space

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92 replies

Jestyn

Level 1

9 points

Mar 9, 2014 1:38 AM in response to Steve Howells

After several mis-steps, I installed Windows 7 successfully.

These are three things in this thread that worked for me. Thanks to all the many commentors who got me there, especially stevefromcambridge .

a) first few times, bootcamp started to partition, then hung. After a bit of reading, I disconnected eveything usb that i didn't need (i.e. except the dvd drive, keyboard and usb drive), before starting bootcamp - problem solved

b) If boot camp does hang at partition and you force quit it, disk utility may report an unexpected level of disk usage (i.e. you're suddenly using more than a tb of data when you know you've only got 300gb on the machine), reboot, cmd-r at bong to get into recovery mode, run disk utilities and repair disk - problem solved

I verified 3 times that this works... 😉

c) When the windows installer ran, it said it couldn't install on any of the many partitions shown. Select the BOOTCAMP one, click on "drive options advanced" then "format". This makes the partition NTFS, and it will then install --> see instruction 4 under install windows at http://help.apple.com/bootcamp/mac/5.0/help/#apdecf0e4b6-b472-438d-881e-57c230b1 c250
(read the instructions?! why? 😉)

Finally, don't worry about all the partitions and unallocated space windows sees, when you finally get back to mac os, you have 3 apparent partitions (a windows one between two macs), but os x treats the two mac ones as a big fusion drive still...

Mar 23, 2014 7:36 PM in response to Jestyn

I just installed Windows 7 on my 3TB Fusion Drive as well (after 3 aborted attempts where I had to completely destroy and then rebuild my Fusion Drive).

The key as highlighted by Jestyn and stevefromcambridge for me was DISCONNECT ALL USB DEVICES. When I first tried running BootCamp Assistant, I had my Time Machine Drive and a Drobo attached. I think this caused the Creating Partition hang problem mentioned by others (where nothing seemed to be happening for an hour). BCA seemed to be stuck. Once I disconnected all of my USB drives, BCA created my BootCamp partition in only a few minutes.

The Mac then successfully booted into the screen to install Windows (I exited at this stage as I was doing a WinClone restore).

All up I was back to having a Windows BootCamp partition running again in under 1 hour.

This was different to my first few attempts where I spent hours and days trying to get BCA running on a 3TB Fusion Drive.

So in summary, DISCONNECT ALL USB DEVICES (especially Drives) before running BCA.

Hope this helps others.

Boot Camp failed on 3TB Fusion - 1TB gone missing