Windows 7 boot camp issue

H

hjahmad

New Member
Ive had some space partitioned away for when i installed windows 7, i just did it today. during the installation, i had and issue with the partition being a gpt scheme or something, i cant remember the exact wording. so i went back to the osx disk utility and formatted the drive in the msdos fat32. went back to the windows disk, and reformatted that partition to ntfs and installed windows perfectly. now osx cannot see that as a partition. in disk utility it just comes up as disk0s3 and is grayed out and i cant mount it and the only information it gives me is that it is MS-DOS(FAT) format. however, when i boot into windows, that is not the case. it is ntfs. and now because osx cant see it properly, i cant make windows my startup disk, i cant see any of the drive contents, and i cant use parallels to use the boot camp partition to virtualize. i did do this a while back with windows vista ultimate and all of this worked fine and i had no issues, but i cant figure out why it wont work now. did i do something different? is it windows 7? but ive been reading the 7 is more like vista when it comes to boot camp installations.
any have this issue before?

thanks for the help
 
You need to use the boot camp utility to create your partition not disk utility. Also, NTFS is read only in OS X unless you are using Mac FUSE or NFTS3G add ons for read/write support.
 
i actually have both of them installed. but since disk utility cant see the drive as a partitioned drive, neither can ntfs3g.
where is the bootcamp utility? i dont think ive ever used it before
 
hjahmad said:
i actually have both of them installed. but since disk utility cant see the drive as a partitioned drive, neither can ntfs3g.
where is the bootcamp utility? i dont think ive ever used it before
Click to expand...

/Applications/Utilities/Boot Camp Assistant
 
Yup, but this is because Windows runs on older legacy hardware that still uses the archaic BIOS system for firmware. Where as Apple computers come standard with EFI. So, your partition needs a boot sector that supports the BIOS systems. That is why you need to use the boot camp assistant.
 
is it possible to resize the ntfs partition without having to erase?
the windows 7 install took only 12 gigs of space but i have 21 allotted. i am not going to save anything on that partition. will load some basic programs, nothing to hefty, and all saved material will be on the osx partition.
can i use disk utility to take some space from windows or will it kill the partition?
 
I am not sure if it can resize the partition on the fly or not. An open source app like GParted may work. I think NTFS3G also has a set of command line tools, which may work.

I don't recall ever resizing an NTFS partition from I have definitely created them before.
 
hjahmad said:
Ive had some space partitioned away for when i installed windows 7, i just did it today. during the installation, i had and issue with the partition being a gpt scheme or something, i cant remember the exact wording. . .
Click to expand...

I am in the middle of a Vista configuration class so GPT is fresh in memory. Basically, you can choose either MBR or GPT as a partition style. You cannot install an OS on a GPT partition in most cases. Most likely GPT was picked by accident when you made the partition, causing all the trouble.

GPT = GUID partition table partition style
GUID= Globally unique identifier
 
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