“This startup disk is not supported.”
I just learned that Boot Camp cannot be installed on a Mac with a partitioned hard disk.
The error message I got was:
I wasted close to an hour trying to troubleshoot this problem before I found the answer hidden away in the documentation. (Duh-uh.)
From the Troubleshooting section at the end of the Boot Camp Installation and Setup Guide:
In order to partition your disk and install Windows using Boot Camp Assistant, the disk must be a single partition, formatted as a Mac OS X Extended (Journaled) volume. If you have already partitioned your disk using Disk Utility or some other utility, you cannot use Boot Camp Assistant until you restore your disk to a single-partition Mac OS X volume.
Boot Camp Assistant works only with internal disks. You cannot use Boot Camp Assistant to partition and install Windows on an external disk
(When in doubt, read the documentation.)
This really sucks for me. I only have one “test mule” computer and I can’t dedicate it to Leopard right now because I’m still writing articles about Tiger. To further complicate matters, I’d planned to install Parallels on the Tiger partition. (So yes, one computer would have four operating systems installed on it. It is a test mule, after all.)
Looks like Boot Camp will have to wait until the end of the writing process and the MacBook Pro’s hard disk will be formatted 100% Leopard sooner than I expected.
On November 18, 2008 at 3:11 pm, 
On November 18, 2008 at 2:59 pm, 
On November 14, 2008 at 10:17 am, 
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5 responses so far ↓
1 Miraz Jordan // Aug 14, 2007 at 2:35 pm
This may be a silly question - but can you install it on an external hard drive instead and still use it?
I haven’t played with Boot Camp, so have no idea if that’s feasible…
2 Maria Langer // Aug 14, 2007 at 2:46 pm
And you might be as bad as me when it comes to selective vision. The second quoted paragraph above says it must be on an internal drive.
But we do think alike (scary, isn’t it?) because an external drive was my first thought, too.
3 Joshua Penn // Aug 14, 2007 at 7:07 pm
If you are trying to use Vista, at least, you can install it on a hard drive and boot from that hard drive without using Boot Camp at all, nor any virtualization such as Parallels or VMWare Fusion. Microsoft silently added EFI support to Vista (Enterprise 32-bit version, at least) after publicly saying that “Vista would not support EFI, and if it were to, it would only be in the 64-bit version.” Sadly, this does not seem to be possible with WinXP unless someone knows of a way for XP to use EFI.
4 Ed Waldrup // Aug 15, 2007 at 4:41 am
Is there a possibility of removing the boot drive you now use and purchasing another to play Boot Camp with? This is easy on a tower not too bad on a recent iMac but out of the question on a portable. This would be a breese on a MacPro with the slide out drives……
You would merely dedicate one drive to one purpose and the other drive to another. Would this work for you?
Best regards.
5 Maria Langer // Aug 15, 2007 at 8:11 am
Ed, not a good option for me: it’s a MacBook Pro. I’ll probably put Tiger on an external Firewire drive I have sitting around. I think I can boot from that. But thanks for the suggestion.
I guess if I had the big bucks and could afford a Mac Pro for a test mule — wouldn’t THAT be great?! — I’d have two hard disks installed in it. (Hey, if you’re gonna dream, dream big!)
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