Possible Partitioning Disaster...

Yep, even I can botch things a bit!

I have a new.used MB Pro, I used Migration to move everything from old MB to this one.  I then went to disk utility to make a 60GB partition for my windows bootcamp.  Then I went to Bootcamp assistant and it told me 'dummy, you cant bootcamp this drive cause it has more than one partition on it already!'

Doh.

So I went back to disk utility and removed that partition.  Then went back to BCA and made the slice there.  Then I noticed that I was missing 60 GB total available space.

Woops.

Went back to DU, there is a big purple area that is dead to me on this drive.  Cant claim it cant partition it to a new drive, cant merge it back to the original.

Any ideas?

I'm not a partitioning expert; it might help if you post a screen shot.

Do the partitions show up as individual partitions under your main hard drive on the left pane? Can you access their Erase tab to format them? Perhaps they need to be formatted for use?

If not, in the DU, select you hard drive on the left pane, then select the Partition tab. Can you click select any of the secondary partitions? Can you click the minus"-" button to delete that partition?

No, can't.  Will try to post a screenie.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/kadath/3688484321/

 No idea, Sam.  Can you wipe the entire drive and just start over?  (Assuming you have the OS media.)  

I guess that is not the most time effective option.     Good luck.

- Walter.

That "big purple area" is the 111GB in use on MainMP. That's your data! You don't want to erase or repartition that! :) The MainMP is a 177GB partition, 111GB in use, and 66GB free. The rest of your 298GB hard drive is in a 121GB BOOTCAMP partition.

It sounds like you want to make the 121GB BC partition larger by reducing the size of your MainMP partition. Because (as in Windows) unmoveable, undeleteable files sometimes get scattered around the hard drive, you may be blocked from further reducing the MainMP partition.

If this is a BootCamp install problem, erase the 121GB BootCamp partition and start again. Asking BCA to re-make a new partition larger than that may fail.

If you want BootCamp smaller, you can resize the MainMP partition and make it larger by dragging its corner in that main DU screen.

If you need a larger BootCamp partition than the current 121GB and you're currently prevented from it you need to
* Do a SuperDuper! clone of your MainMP partition to an external drive
* Reinstall your entire computer from that clone
* Immediately run BCA to make the new partition.

This will defrag the drive, giving you full access to partitioning. I've done just this and it works.

Well, I fixed it but still not sure how it got confused.  All I did was remove the Bootcamp partition and used the drag handle in the lower right of the Main partition over the free space and it collected it all and now reports correctly.

Thanks!
Sam

Glad you got it sorted out.