Format partition without losing it all

[waradmin]

I am looking to put OSx86 on my Desktop to accompany my Macbook, and in the past my OSx86 installs were all done on a separate HD making the process very simple. However now I have a unformatted 130GB partition on my second SATA drive (that is 500GB total) and I want to format it as HFS+ Journaled and put OS X on it. Sounds easy enough. Well I tried to have OS X use the empty space, and it informed me that all data on the drive would be lost. Hm, I said Ok anyway, and was presented with an error 1 second later, and both partitions (the 330GB with data and the 130GB that was empty) were gone.

 

That happened friday, and finally today after much effort i was able to save most of my data, however the folder structure was not preserved so I have thousands of files in 2000 folders named FOLDER#### that I need to sort through. Yay.

 

Now to the question at hand, how can I install OSx86 on the blank space without losing my data again and having to do multiple sector by sector scans to recover what was lost? Is there a way to format the drive in Windows so it is ready to go? I have Macdrive but it will not let me format the drive (which is known in windows as just a 'primary partition' unformatted without a drive letter)? Or is there a way to tell Disk Utility to use the free space in a non-destructive matter?

 

Thanks!

[sardaukar]

You messed up somewhere. I have a laptop with a 100GB drive and managed to install OS X in a free 10GB partition with no problems whatsoever in the rest of the disk.

[waradmin]

Yeah, I have installed it many times before (at least 8 times) over the years and have had no issues, just this one time it screwed me over hardcore.

 

I managed to get it working, same method as before but this time it threw no errors. Very odd.