Now before I write this post I’d like to apologise to Steve Jobs for installing Windows an my MacBook. Yes I know I may well rot in hell.

With that out of the way, here’s what I found myself fighting with before the install.

Now I’d not tried Boot Camp before, so this was all new to me. I opened the assistant, told the app to give me a 10GB partition and bam! Error.

Much shouting and Googling later, and I found a few forum threads pointing to large files placed at the edge of your HDD that OS X can’t move in order to create the partition. Data fragmentation was also blamed, and using iDefrag was the app I was told to use. The only problem with that is my SSD. You don’t defrag a Solid State Drive for a couple of reasons. Have a search for more info.

Reinstalling OS X was also an option given to me, which I wasn’t impressed with. This got me thinking though. If I just need to wipe the drive and start again, why not create a clone of the disk and restore it ? Off I went to download SuperDuper and backed everything up to my external drive. A swift reboot and restore later and all was well. Boot Camp assistant worked first time, as did the Windows 7 installation.

Now admittedly this isn’t much quicker than a complete reinstall, but it’s probably easier. It’s also a better option if you don’t have a Time Machine backup to pull your data back post reinstall, and don’t fancy starting all over again.

So there we are. I suspect Google will bring a few people to this post when they search for an answer to their problem. Hopefully this option will help some of you !

Please do let me know how you get on.