Over the course of a few days I have played around with installing the public beta of Windows 7 on my mid-2007 edition MacBook Pro, and making it work in VMware Fusion. I had some issues along the way and had to do a fair amount of research to resolve them.

To begin with, I tried using Apple’s Boot Camp Assistant to split my hard disk into my regular partition for OS X and a 25 gigabyte windows partition. I had done this without issue before when dual booting with Windows XP (I’ve never owned a machine running Vista). However this time it failed. Boot Camp told me sternly that I could not create the partition because there were ‘files which could not be moved’. This basically meant that there was not enough contiguous free space on my drive to create the large partition I requested, and the files were too large to be moved. This occurs because OS X automatically defragments your hard drive unless it encounters files larger than 20 mb. So over the course of one and a half years of use, my computer’s drive became too fragmented to partition. Continue reading →