dual booting osx/win7 on a macbook

[crackadillicus]

hi all,

i imagine i've got a bit of a unique situation, but hopefully one of you might be able to point me in the right direction

i've got a macbook running win7, and i want to dualboot it and get osx back on there. should be easy, osx on a macbook, right? **** me.

i did a bit of homework first, and reviewed what other people have done for dualbooting, but all of the threads are ancient and address different specific issues

so here are the steps i went through:

-created a second partition in win7, ntfs, made it active
-rebooted with an authentic osx snow leopard disc
-osx installation startup began
-went into disk utility to format it to "journalled" and get this error:
"Volume Erase failed with the error: Could not modify partition map"

it won't let you install until the disk is formatted correctly...any ideas guys? any help would be huge

thanks!

 

[wallyinnc]

Hi Crackkadillicus, and welcome to the forums
You can't get much dumber than me when it comes to Mac, but I think you need a different format than ntfs, don't you? GUID I think? And I have seen you need at least 6.5G
I found this tutorial from Apple: "You cannot install Mac OS X on this volume..." alert in Installer
I hope it helps

 

[Riho]

I had the same problem about 4-5 months when i had XP and i was trying to dual-boot Windows 7( luckily i have 2 hard-drives so i did format). I dont realy know much about Mac-s, but here's what you ll do:
1) Install osx
2) install Windows 7
3) Then under of Windows 7, install EasyBCD EasyBCD - Free software downloads and software reviews - CNET Download.com
then next go to
4)Add/Remove Entries and choose Mac, and then choose from the list iMac/Macbook. Click Add Entry
5) Go to Manage bootloader and click on the Write MBR button.
Restart
and after that when u turn on your computer you will see automatically every time bootmanager (osx and windows 7)
i hope it helped you

(ofc you ll need 2 partition for that)

 

[crackadillicus]

hi, thanks for the suggestions

maybe i wasn't too clear about my problem - the issue i'm having is in reformatting the partitioned drive

i'm following loosely the guide found here, and garnering information from wherever i can...

so i can partition the drive, and according to everything i can see so far, the initial drive type (fat32 vs ntfs) shouldn't matter as i'm trying to reformat it with osx's disk utility - but i can't modify it from there. is there a way maybe to partition a drive and format it to Mac osx Journaled from win7?

 

[chrisemersonnc]

I am in the exact same boat as you crackadillicus! I can't get past this dreaded "can't modify partition map" message either!

Did you ever figure it out? Anyone else?