The other day, I finally got a chance to install Boot Camp and Windows Vista Ultimate on my MacBook Pro. I'll talk about Windows Vista in detail in a later posting, but I wanted to post a quick tip for anyone who might be having issues with Boot Camp partitioning. When I tried to partition my drive, Boot Camp told me:
The disk cannot be partitioned because some files cannot be moved.
Then, as if it was a valid work-around, Boot Camp told me to back up my files, wipe the drive, repartition, reinstall Mac OS X, and copy my files back, then try Boot Camp again. Yeah, that's not happening. It took me several searches and some crawling on the Apple Discussion forums before I found the answer to my problem. It turns out, Boot Camp can't partition your drive if you have any files larger than 4GB. In my case, it was an old Parallels virtual hard drive file from an Ubuntu install. That file was 4.2GB. As soon as I deleted it, Boot Camp partitioning worked just fine.
So if you run into trouble using Boot Camp, look for large files and either delete them or move them to an external drive in the mean time. Then you'll be able to partition and install Windows.