I decided this week to once again install Windows XP onto my MacBook, and set it up with the couple applications I needed for work. Hauling a laptop to the office is not onerous, but the MacBook is a hell of a lot lighter than the clunker Dell. Nevermind that I need Windows to run Ventrilo during guild runs.
Having used Boot Camp before, I felt pretty comfortable with repartitioning my drive and fiddling with the Apple drivers. I spent an afternoon clearing some space; I removed ripped DVDs, a seldom-used backup installation of WoW, some software that came with the MacBook and a lot of downloads and log files. I grabbed the latest Boot Camp and ran the installer. One gratuitous legal agreement later, and I am attempting to set up a 20gb FAT partition.
Your disk cannot be partitioned because some files cannot be moved
Back up the disk and use Disk Utility to format the disk as a single Mac OS Extended (Journaled) volume. Restore your information to the disk and try using Boot Camp Assistant again.
Damn.
I was pretty sure from the start the issue was fragmentation. The intarweb was not much help, but I was able to find a very nice defrag utility for the Mac, called iDefrag. Running a trial version of their software showed me exactly what I expected… the MacBook had no contiguous space large enough to partition.
So I bit. The software was easy to buy and I soon had a licensed copy. I rebooted the MacBook into Target Disk Mode and plugged it into the G5. An overnight Optimize cleaned up the drive nicely, but I was not done yet; I still had to run Apple’s disk utility to fix a small error that iDefrag had created. Not a big deal.
Now if only Windows XP did not make me feel so… exposed.