sedric

The thin piece of metal above the release button (the button that releases the screen when the laptop is closed) has bent out...

So I need to defragment the hard drive of my mac book so that boot camp will let me repartition it. I would like to avoid hav...

All the defrag programs look good, but I wasn't wanting to pay anything for this, and I didn't have a external drive I could back up to. So what I did instead was to zip up all the data files I had on the laptop (ie everything other than programs) then I copied them to a desktop. This took me from about 35GB free to over 90GB free space on the drive. The boot camp utility was then able to properly format the 15GB partition I wanted. And then I copied everything back. I'm not entirely sure how boot camp partitions drives, whether it is in contiguous blocks or not, so this may work all the time, or perhaps not.

I can second this. I have several friends that work for apple, including one in the laptop department, and it is by far the biggest problem they come across with the drives on mac books.

They were still teaching a few color codes when I took a class in the late 90's. This was all so much simpler back then! Things have become so much more complicated.

P.S. I love the teardown.