28
2009
Bootcamp Assistant: How to overcome the “files cannot be moved” issue
An article by Glen
You’re busy trying to use the Bootcamp Assistant to install a bootcamp partition on your shiny Macbook, when suddenly you’re greeted with the dreaded fragmentation dialog of death:
So what does “The disk cannot be partitioned because some files cannot be moved” actually mean? I mean, I’ve got 25Gb free and I only want a 10Gb windows partition! The answer lies in fragmentation. OSX seems to want a contigious block of clean disk to write to, and fragments of your files are scattered across it.
I know what you’re thinking. “But it’s a Mac. I’ve got this fancy file system that isn’t prone to fragmentation”. Yeah, yeah. Well, dude, the crushing news is that you can fix the problem by defragmenting your hard disk then trying again, so I guess OSX isn’t as committed to defragmentation as you might suspect.
I’m sure there are many ways to defrag an OSX hard disk. I chose to fork out 20 Euro and make the problem go away using iDefrag. There may well be open source/free alternative out there (feel free to comment if you know of any — useful for other googlers who come on by). iDefrag does its best work when it’s not defragging the boot disk, so you’ll want to generate a bootable DVD to run it from. Fortunately it ships with the tool to generate that bootable DV for you.
iDefrag ships will a free product called “Coriolis CDMaker”. Stick your Snow Leopard disk in the drive, run the CDMaker app, and it will get busy generating a bootable DVD for you with iDefrag as the autorun. Stick your bootable DVD in the drive, restart OSX, and hold down the “C” key as the machine boots — and it will boot up your DVD and run iDefrag.
Defragging takes some time – mine took about 3 hours to run – but that’s a lot less hassle than reformatting and restoring my entire drive. After the defrag I could happily run the Bootcamp Assistant without any “some files cannot be moved” drama.
About the Author: Glen Smith
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Glen Smith
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Thanks very much for this, ran into this exact problem just today.
I’ll try it.. thanx
Will it work with the quick (online) algorithm? Or is an offline algorithm required?
@Ruben I used the offline algorithm. Not sure if the quick one will work.
Nope. Quick (online) algorithm won’t work.
Anyway, before you spend money to buy iDefrag there’s a nother way you could try:
- Use Disk Inventory-X (freeware) to locate large size files: http://www.derlien.com/index.html
- Disable hibernation and remove sleep image: http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20070302210328928
- Move large size files to external hardisk, including large application like Adobe CS. You can safely return it later after partitioning is done.
After that, try partitioning again using Bootcamp Assistant. Hope it helps.
Thanks very much
Booting off my OSX disk and then running repair on my drive saved me from having to reinstall or run defrag. Try this first.
same as jonah above, and it worked! no need for defrag or format. thanks!
You can also reduce the size of your Bootcamp partition a little – repeat until the error goes away. If you can live with the size of partition you wind up with, you are good to go. This worked for me.
I did this and I defragmented the drive, and when I went to partition the drive, it still said “The disk cannot be partitioned because some files cannot be moved”. I have tons of space, and only wanted a small part of my drive to be for windows. What do I do??
I can confirm that Jonah’s solution to boot off of the OS X disk and then run a repair on the drive works.
Hey thanks for the tip to use the repair thing.
Im as current imaging win 7 on a macbook for a girl i know. Kept getting that error. Was dreading having to tell her i couldnt do it. (im kind of her tech hero lol).
Anyway the repair worked. and im installing win 7 now.
Thanks
Per the advice here, I started from the Mac OS X disk and ran disk repair. I also repaired disk permissions. Afterwards I restarted normally, ran bootcamp, and partitioning worked perfectly! No need for me to defragment.
Thank you for the advice. This was much better than reformatting and starting from scratch as many others suggested.
Heyy guys,
I have trouble using Jonah’s advice.Even if I saved files on my OS, I can still run the OSX Disc and run repair? Of I repair it, then all the saved movies, apps, word documents are gone?
Li
jonah’s advice really work no need to defrag. thanks!
The solution for me was to run Repair Disk and also run Repair Disk Permissions. It only takes 12 minutes, so try this simple trick first! I had the same problem with Snow Leopard (although not with Leopard). I cleared 50GB of free space and still got the “not enough space” error. I defragged using iDefrag ($30 and 3 hours) and then got the “some files cannot be moved” error. But thanks to a tip elsewhere, I booted off my Snow Leopard install disk (hold the C key as you boot until the lanuage selection screen appears.) From the Utilities menu on the install screen choose Disk Utility, then Repair Disk. Pass it on!
That’s great But… you don’t have to buy iDefrag to fix this, you can do it with the simple tools that are bundled in your OSX, take a look at this post
http://plususefulness.blogspot.com/2011/09/fixed-boot-camp-partition-failure.html
Jonah’s advice is the simplest and the best way out of this! It works on the first time!
Thanks!
What algorithm should be used if i am using Idefrag?
you may also run repair disk in disk utility
how exactly do u do jonahs method? what does “booting off my OSX disk mean?