MacOS – Bootcamp issue: The startup disk cannot be partitioned or restored to a single partition

bootcampmacmacosmojavepartition

I tried installing windows 10 on mac but some sort of error occured and since then boot camp had been removing the partitions for hours. So I ran "diskutil eraseVolume fat32 BOOTCAMP disk0s3" on terminal as mentioned on another thread: Stuck on "please wait while Boot Camp Assistant is removing the partitions it created". Then I closed the Bootcamp window and reopened. Now that I click "Continue" on the Introduction, it prompts: "The startup disk cannot be partitioned or restored to a single partition. The startup disk must be formatted as a single Mac OS Extended (Journaled) volume or already partitioned by Boot Camp Assistant for installing Windows."

I no more want to install Windows. Please help me restore the storage used up for windows.

Thanks in advance.

(Running macOS Mojave(10.14.1) on Macbook Air(2017))

Best Answer

I had the same issue. I solved it with following steps:

Stop Bootcamp Assistant
Eject all external drives (USB sticks and mounted ISO files)
Restart Mac
Relaunch Bootcamp Assistant

Normally you will be able to follow restore the previous state without Bootcamp partition.

By the way in my case the origin of the problem was probably the use of a MSDN ISO of Windows 10 including multiple installs.

I downloaded an ISO from https://www.microsoft.com/fr-fr/software-download/windows10ISO and could complete the Bootcamp Assistant.

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MacOS – restore one partition of OS X El Capitan

Did you try removing the disk partition with Disk Utility? Bootcamp can be difficult with these things once you've had a first attempt.

Did you know you don't need Bootcamp necessarily to install Windows? You can create the partitions yourself and activate the install by booting from your USB stick image. Just need to be sure that you have got the drivers for Windows 10 to hand from Bootcamp once Windows is installed.

All the best!

BootCamp partition error even though the drive is one partition

I was able to install Windows after doing two things. I'm not positive which one did the trick as I did them both in between an attempt to run bootcamp. These are the things I did in order:

Install reFind... doing this added the missing EFI partition that was mentioned I was missing in the comments for this question.
Use the reFind partition editor to fix the Master Boot Record (MBR) table for my HDD. This partition editor can be found on the reFit menu (launched by choosing the reFit option on the reFind menu)

After this, I launched mac, started boot camp, and the 'status: partitioning disk' message/bar restarted and then it was able to finish partitioning and I have since installed Windows successfully. Any hints on why this finally worked would be much appreciated!

Also, something to note is that after I installed reFind, my partition table (output to diskutil list) was:

/dev/disk0 (internal, physical):
#:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *500.3 GB   disk0
1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk0s1
2:                  Apple_HFS MAC HDD                 500.1 GB   disk0s2

Best Answer

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MacOS – restore one partition of OS X El Capitan

BootCamp partition error even though the drive is one partition

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