Boot Camp Assistant crashes during partition
Since i use a MacBook I have been getting a bit annoyed at not being able to test my sites in IE6 or IE7 unless i go home and turn on the pc. Sure i can run IE6 in X11 but its slow and a little buggy, plus IE7 doesn’t run at all.
Since i am running Leopard i thought that i would try and install boot camp and then run Windows XP on a new partition on the hard drive. There are tons of tutorials about how to do this and the process is simple but you may have tried doing it only to find Boot Camp crashed whilst making the partition and you end up having to do a hard reset… this will happen time and time again until you do a little bit of tricky.
So here is a quick step by step guide to getting boot camp to work 100%, the guide assumes that you have already tried using boot camp and that it crashed whilst creating a partition…
1) Boot camp has just crashed…
2) Place your Leopard install disk 1 into the CD drive and turn off the computer
3) Whilst booting up keep your finger pressed on the C key, this forces your mac boot from the dvd drive
4) Wait ages until OSX installation gets going and the on the menu bar find Disk Utility
5) Select your hard drive in Disk Utility (DU) and click repair…
What we are doing here is rebuilding the partition because when Boot Camp crashed it was half way through creating a new one, thus you will have less space available if you don’t repair the disk
6) Wait for repair to finish and then reboot the machine, again holding C to load the OSX install disk
7) Now we are going to go back into Disk Utility and create the partition that boot camp was supposed too.
The reason boot camp is crashing is caused by it trying to move files from the space that it was going to partition. Since Boot Camp was running in OSX it could not move the files and sent the kernel into a panic. Now we are booting from a CD so by creating the partition we are forcing it to move the files into a different area.
8 ) You will see something similar to the image below, but you will probably only have 1 partition. Simply click on the + arrow at the bottom right (my image doesnt show this) and it will add a new partition. You should resize this to be about 1gb larger than you was planning to use for boot camp
9) Apply the changes and let DU do its work, once it has finished exit out and then reboot, again holding C to boot from the install disk
10) After the disk has loaded again, go back into DU, and select your new partition, click the - button and it will throw up a warning to say that the partition will be deleted but all information on the original partition will be ok. For the love of God make sure you selected the partition that you wanted to delete and triple read the wording to make sure you are removing the new, smaller partition.
10a) You now need to resize the original mac partition so it fills the entire disk, simply grab and drag the partition to fill the space.
Thanks go to Sergio in the comments for pointing out this step i had missed
11) Wait for it to finish, exit out of DU and reboot, DON’T hold C this time, we want to boot into native OSX
12) Go back into Boot Camp and go through the process, now that we have a clean section on the drive it can partition the disk without any issue.
13) Wait until the partition has been made and you should see…
14) Put your Windows XP or Vista (ha) disk in, and wait for an icon to appear on your desktop, once it does hit start installation, and wait for the machine to reboot.
15) You will now reboot into Windows installer mode, go through the yadda yadda and you should see something like…
16) Make sure you install on the new partition that was created, the screen shot doesnt show it but OSX will have labelled this partition [BOOTCAMP] [FAT32] - hit enter to install on that partition.
17) When asked how to format i chose Fat 32 as it allows Leopard to actually write files back to a windows disk, you could then say edit a txt file from both within Leopard and XP. Its your choice but make sure you reformat it and dont select the option which says “Leave it how it is”
17) Go through the boring windows setup and wait for it to complete, once Windows runs you will need to pop your Leopard install disk into the machine to install all the windows drivers, this is thankfully painless.
18) Marvel at XP on a Mac, and pat yourself on the back, its been a hell of a ride.
Bonus tip:
If you want to select which operating system to use during boot up simply keep the option (alt) key pressed and you will get the following screen…
If this has helped you, please leave a comment :o)
24 Responses so far
April 21st, 2008
3:12 pm
Hi Chewie,
thank you for this useful hint, i knew it could be done better than the “backup & reinstall” method propagated by apple.
A small heads-up: instead of repeatedly holding “c” during boot until your fingertips go numb, you can also command the installer to reboot from the dvd automatically, by selecting it as the startup-volume (should be right there in the menu with DU) and subsequently hitting restart. The last time (step 11), select your hd, of course.
Cheers!
Andreas
April 21st, 2008
8:56 pm
Hi Andreas,
I am glad the solution worked for you, and thank you for leaving a comment and also your tip. I was getting sick and tired of holding down C so wish i had of realised your method before.
Chewie
April 21st, 2008
11:34 pm
Hi Chewie,
I got as far as step 9, but then it came up with the same error as in step 1 (telling me to hold down power button to restart…). This is really frustrating as I haven’t got a clue where to go from here. Any advice would be greatly appreciated?
Jeeves
April 22nd, 2008
4:14 am
THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU.
i didnt NOT want to format the whole thing and start from scratch
April 22nd, 2008
9:23 am
Hey Jeeves,
Just a couple of things to check…
1) Are you 100% sure that you booted from the Leopard boot disk when trying to change the partition?
2) This may be a silly question. but have you got enough disk space to create a partition.
I would only expect the machine to crash if you was trying to change the partition within OSX and not the boot disk.
April 23rd, 2008
11:41 pm
Thanks very much for the tip. I was pulling my hair out and thinking I’d have to buy iDefrag or something just to get Windows installed. The tip worked perfectly and everything went smoothly.
April 30th, 2008
6:00 am
Hello All and thank you, you!
My english isn’t perfect so, i don’t understand what exactly to do at step 8:
8 ) You will see something similar to the image below, but you will probably only have 1 partition. Simply click on the + arrow at the bottom right (my image doesnt show this) and it will add a new partition. You should resize this to be about 1gb larger than you was planning to use for boot camp
What do you mean? What i hahe to do exactly? WHat is the arow at bottom right?
April 30th, 2008
9:46 am
Hi David,
For step 8 you should see a button that looks like this [+] which is positioned in the lower section of the screen
You click that and then it will create a new partition that you can resize by sliding it up and down.
You want to make the new partition 1gb bigger than you are intending to use for boot camp.
May 2nd, 2008
9:02 am
This worked a treat for me. Thank you very much
May 10th, 2008
2:49 am
Hey, thanks this worked well for me.
Jeeves, I think I ran into the same problem as you, but here’s what I found: After you delete the partition you created, you need to *resize the old partition* back to it’s full size. You do this by dragging the bottom right hand corner of the white box.
It may seem obvious to others, but I missed it the first time and was initially quite confused - Chewie’s solution is quite clever and there’s no reason it shouldn’t work as far as I could nut out. So I went back and did the above, and voila, it worked. Anyway, hth.
Cheers and thanks again for the fix!
May 14th, 2008
6:42 am
I had this problem too and, it turns out, it was actually being caused by the fact that I have some HONKING big (12gb and larger) files on my machine. Disk Utility simply couldn’t cope with any of them.
So, in order to get things working, I repaired my drive following the instructions in your post, and then had to move any files over 1gb onto an external drive (this includes things like parallels installations).
Works like a charm now! Thanks, Chewie!
May 20th, 2008
4:19 pm
great post, you just saved me a lot of effort backing everything up and reinstalling like apple said.
May 21st, 2008
7:57 pm
[...] I came across a workable solution while hunting through the internet this afternoon. Hopefully it finds some of you helpful. [...]
May 24th, 2008
10:54 am
THANK YOU! Seriously this guide is extremely useful.
May 28th, 2008
9:19 am
Hi I have the same problem my computer crashed while doing the partition and I followed Chewie method, while installing the OX CD 1 I was either delete to old or to archive and install, its says it cant continue because I have an updated OX in my computer, what should should I do.
Many thanks
May 28th, 2008
10:43 am
Hey Clarisse
Can you explain a bit more about your problem? You shouldn’t have to reinstall OSX at all. You are just using it as a boot disk to open disk utility so once it has booted up you should be able to select disk utility from the menu bar.
May 28th, 2008
12:18 pm
Hi Chewie,
I manage to repair the disk But I cant see the image like in step 8… You will see something similar to the image below.
I went to the bootcamp assistant again but I got an error stating that I cant do the partition and the disk need repairing….
Ohhh Boy I have been doing this all day… Please help
May 30th, 2008
12:12 am
Yep, there’s a step you missed Chewie, between 10 and 11.
Because after deleting this new partition, you need to resize the original (Macintosh) partition to it’s original size. I was also very confused with this, but finally figured it out.
Anyway, thanks for posting this tutorial; after almost 2 years of owning my MBPro, I was finally able to install WinXP on it, and it works great!
May 30th, 2008
10:47 am
Hi Sergio,
Thanks for pointing that out for me, i have edited the steps and credited you for spotting it.
Glad you finally managed to get Xp installed on the pro :o)
May 30th, 2008
10:55 am
clarisse
I would suggest running disk utility again from the boot dvd and running a full repair.
Then once it has done that, restart the machine again booting from the dvd and go into the disk utility and hopefully you will see something similar to my image which will let you create a new partition.
June 5th, 2008
8:17 pm
Hi Chewie,
I have tried again and again but I still have the same problem once I do the boot camp partition and I have an error stating the disk error and I should run repair.
What should I do now. Please help
Many thanks,
Clarisse
June 7th, 2008
9:24 am
Hi I have tried all of these steps to no avail! My problem is once i go to create the second partition using du it attempts to map then says I havent enough room. yet i have over thirty unused gigs
June 10th, 2008
10:16 am
Clarisse: I have no idea why you are constantly getting the error without seeing your machine. I hate to say it but you may have to resort to backing up and then reinstalling Leopard :o(
Nathan: Have you tried to create a really small partition, e.g 5gb?
June 15th, 2008
8:56 am
Hi Chewie,
Many thanks, I have never use a Mac before so I don’t really know how to install Leopard, means what should I do.
Regards,
Clarisse
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