In a prior post I discussed my problems trying to replace Windows 7 Release Candidate on a MacBook Pro under Bootcamp. This weekend I took another shot at it, having found some posts that suggested my issues might be related to disk fragmentation.
Thanks to these posts, I was able to solve my blocking problems and reinstall Windows on my Mac in a Bootcamp partition:
- Gizmodo’s summary of how to install Windows 7 in Bootcamp, so you can run Windows 7 natively on your Mac
- A user’s “reluctant review” of iDefrag – learning by doing
Disk fragmentation was indeed the problem preventing Bootcamp from setting up a Windows-ready partition on my Mac. Once I had defragged the hard drive, Apple’s Bootcamp utility was easily able to set up and size a partition to accommodate Windows 7, and the Windows [clean] install proceeded normally. So now I’m back in business, running Windows 7 on a 3-year-old MacBook Pro.
Defragging a Mac
To make this possible I purchased and downloaded a copy of iDefrag from Coriolis Systems (about $30). The process is fairly straightforward.
To defragment the Mac’s hard drive you have to make a small boot disk (on a CD or DVD) using a utility provided by Coriolis. Once you start up from this boot CD/DVD, it automatically launches the defrag utility. To get the best results for Bootcamp, select the “Compact” option (which is the default). Don’t use the “Quick” option.
On my system it took a couple of hours, but everything ran smoothly. (I started the utility and then went off for a hike.) iDefrag works just fine under Snow Leopard.
Word to the wise: It’s important to follow all the precautionary steps: backing up your hard drive, checking it via Disk Utility, etc., before initiating the defrag process.
In 20+ years of using Macs for business, this is the first time I’ve ever had to run a defragmentation utility on a Mac hard drive — even though it’s a regular chore on my PCs. That’s probably the reason why it never dawned on me that all the error messages reported by Windows’ install program and Bootcamp were being caused by disk fragmentation. That and the fact that the error messages were so obscure, and so generic, that none pointed to fragmentation as a potential cause of the blocking issues.
One final note: you may get the impression from Microsoft’s marketing materials that you have to replace Windows 7 RC with Windows 7 Ultimate. If you can figure out how to do this as an upgrade, that’s perhaps the case. In my experience the process of using Windows 7 RC taught me that I don’t need the extra features of Ultimate, so I bought the non-upgrade version of Windows 7 Professional, and installed that on my Mac. It’s working just fine.
I’m just sorry I’ve had to spend 8 hours to get to this point, knowing I’ll have to repeat some of these steps (but not the defrag process) once I replace this MacBook Pro with a new generation model sometime this spring, as originally planned.
Revised on June 4, 2010
