Macbook Pro Owner now, few questions Thanks!

LoL so I was borrowing a macbook pro 620m i7 15" with the older nvidia 300 series GPU in it and the higher res Anti Glare Screen from a friend and he decided to move out of the state and sold me the notebook for $900 So I obviously paid for it cause I found myself using the macbook more then I originally had intended (Yes I have fallen in love with an Apple who would have guessed adding this to the 4 alienwares I currently own) . I hope I got a good price on it from a good friend but I think the answer to that question is an obvious YES!.

However moving on, I'm trying to install a partition of around 40-50 gigs onto my HDD but the disk utility keeps on telling me that it unexpectedly fails when trying to create the partition. Unfortunately all I got with my system were the original box and PSU without any disks so I can't reinstall OS X I think

I like using OS X but occasionally I wanna play company of heroes on my new macbook and I think my system is sufficient to handle it. Any help would be greatly appreciated, Thanks!

 

Dude, you have 3 alienwares!!! What made you like mac?

Anyways, try using the drive in external adaptor and partition it with your other laptop

 

Are you trying to partition it to set up a Windows install? Why not use the Boot Camp utility then to create the partition

 

The Boot Camp Utility? IN either case I believe when I did this and I tried to create the partition it said that it failed to create the partition.

 

Yeah, Boot Camp will set up a partition so you can install Windows or other operating system. You may have some corruption on the disk itself - try and see if you can verify the disk thru Disk Utility and see if it finds and fixes any errors

 

Partitioning in general is a somewhat risky operation. It's not guaranteed to succeed on other operating systems either. It depends on the state of the disc, how much space you have remaining, and where that free space actually exists on the disc.

Windows, by comparison, won't even attempt to partition anything but a blank disc.

I think you need to go ahead and buy Lion.

Back up your files. Boot up the lion installer. Wipe the entire disc. You can partition the entire disc right there, or just let the boot camp installer handle it right after you install Lion (this is probably the best way).

 

Masterchef has it.

A clean install will allow bootcamp to create a partition for you. I've noticed that when the disk gets full bootcamp can't always move the files around to allow it to create a partition. Formatting the drive will fix this.

 

Ok so if i don't have the disks for a clean install, how do I go about obtaining a disk with OS X on it? My Macbook Pro didn't come with it

 

Purchase Lion thru the App Store for $29 or whatever the cost is, and you can burn a disk from the download file (there's a thread up with instructions somewhere, or just Googley it). Or you can get one of them fancy dancy $69 Lion thumbdrive's from Apple

 

Your wrong.

It's weird. Alot of mac users seem to talk trash about windows when they are completely wrong.


Search>Computer Management>Disk Management

On windows will get you let you manage your hard drive - extend, shrink, delete, create partitions. And a bunch of other stuff; i have no idea what they do - mirrored , striped volume?


Unless what your talking about having a 700Gb partition on a 700Gb Hard Drive...
Then obviously you have to shrink the 700Gb partition to make room for a new partition? It's not rocket science

 

Agreed. There is really no risk to partitioning a hard drive unless you really don't know anything about computers. A little Google Search goes a long way.

 

Believe me guys I wish I could partition it but I can't. Something is wrong with the drive and I'm going to have to back it up before I can do anything else.

 

thats because you dont know how controllers handle the info, nor how the OS does it.

Always back it up before parting the disk

 

Hi darkloki,

What version of OS X are you running? If you have at least 10.5, you have Time Machine, which you can use to do a backup. You will still need a bootable disk. You may have to call Apple and see about getting a set of OS X DVDs for your MPB. If you have 10.6 (Snow Leopard), you can buy and upgrade to Lion (10.7), but you still won't have backups of the iLife apps that were included with the MBP.

I have had a similar problem on OS X 10.5 (Leopard), where there was insufficiant contiguous space to create a new partition. The "official" solution from Apple (I actually used my AppleCare and called them) was to restore my machine from a Time Machine backup, which will effectively defragment the disk. Once I did that, I was able to create the partition, and it "only" took about an hour. Good Luck!

Rich S.

 

Ok couple of things first off my Mac

2010 version 15" with the Anti Glare Screen, not too bad for $900

Anyways I realize I probably should call apple but for some odd reason every time I call during my schedule they're always closed. So I just kinda gave up and I'm going with installing parallels Desktop which I'm currently doing right now. I realize some people would prefer a complete overhaul/install but I think given my situation I'd just prefer to do this, anyone have objections? And if so why?

 

Lastly, I don't have Lion should I really get it? The improvements don't seem really necessary to me as I don't think I'd use any of it. On top of that I've heard alot of bad things about it when utilized with my model of macbook, meaning Black Screens and Freezes.

 

I've been using computers for over 20 years. Built more computers than I care to admit and partitioned even more hard drives. I've never lost 1 piece of data. I don't have to know "how controllers handle the info".

Stop trying to scare people with your 'nerd speak'.

 

As someone who knows more than I'll likely ever need to about the details of the means in which data is transferred to/from and arranged on the hard disk, I concur with tusctodd.

It's completely irrelevant to know the intricate details of the inner workings of the system to be able to use the system. Moreover, this phenomenon is not coincidence, it is by design.

 

just because you dont have to know how a system handles things, it doesnt mean that other people like me dont. Aside the snide remark the problem here is how HFS+ handles the writing of info on the disk, and that is more than probably why the OP couldnt partition the HD.

Partiotining a HDD is always something that you do with less data than with more, aside that you always back it up.

 

Ok getting back to my topic at hand, well I'll just say it now guys. Settle down Mac Users are suppose to be friendly/kind not snobby know it all's Let's start fresh. Ok so I didn't partition my drive because I went with the Parallels route and installed windows as some weird .hdd file (That's how Parallels works) But parallels sucks it didn't detect my Video Drivers So I give up going to reformat everything like people suggested. Or at least hope that when I get my disks it'll have video drivers on there for me to use in windows, maybe?!?!??!

So I called up Apple Care, FINALLY! took a 9 min wait but uhhhh lol I'm covered until 2014 April, wow I'm surprised they sent me the disks to my home free of charge. So yeah I'm glad to be part of the apple family and this support seems great so far

 

sure enough, i was wrong about windows not having the included tools to resize partitions without wiping them. I wasn't randomly talking trash about windows, I was just wrong.

 

sure you can get gpu drivers from nvidia, just go in their verde drivers page and donwload

 

I went to 32 bit gt 330m for notebooks and it didn't work

 

did you install windows? for osx drivers you need to use software update, its in the apple icon right top corner

 

I'm talking about within windows though. I know the apple stuff, but apple doesn't have any games I like atm.

 

did you try here?

Drivers - Download NVIDIA Drivers

it actually should work, dunno whats wrong? is there any kind of warning?

 

Clink on that link yourself it doesn't really go anywhere other then a selection menu....

 

just clicked and downloaded

here is a more straight forward link to you

NVIDIA DRIVERS 285.62 WHQL

 

I'm going to reinstall windows/Pareallels 7 and try it again. In the meantime I have OSX being sent directly to me from Apple with the Drivers too so I plan to go the Bootcamp method.

 

you were trying to install those drivers using a VM? well its emulating the hardware, thats why you couldnt install it

 

Got My Disks Today, apparently Apple Overnighted it But the disks wouldn't read, I called Apple Up and they too said the disks wouldn't read Then the apple guy told me to look at the disk... It was cracked Fricken Fed-Ex

 

Apple Store did it for me, lol. Glad that's over and done with, Anyone have suggestions for how big a Partition for Windows should be? I only want to play 1 game on windows and that's it on windows. The game I think is just over 9 gigs.

 

put 100gb on that partition, given that you are only using it to play games, thats a safe size, around 20gb for the OS, and youve got left around 70-75gb for games, which are now usually 10-15gb depending on what you play, mine where usually around 1gb so my win partition was much smaller