05 April 2006

Boot Camp Partitioning

So Apple's Boot Camp Assistant beta software announced today allows any Intel based Mac dual boot with Windows XP SP2. Very cool. They've even announced that this capability will be a part of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. Some things to note: 1. If you already have multiple drive partitions, the Boot Camp Assistant will fail. It requires a single Mac OS X Extended (Journaled) partition. 2. You may have to wipe your drive. I have 15 GB free on my MacBook, but when the dynamic partitioner tried to clear 10 GB for use as the Windows boot volume I get this error: I guess I'll just have to wait until I can wipe my machine. I thought this might have been because my iDisk was mounted, but that wasn't it. I'm guessing the partitioner needs contiguous drive space and while I might have had 15 GB free, it wasn't free in the correct locations. Bummer.

8 comments:

David Weiss said...

BTW, if you want good Windows Media Player performance, upgrade to Windows Media Player 10. WMP 9 is installed by default with Windows XP.

Anonymous said...

You mean the only reason why you installed BootCamp was to get WMP10 on your Mac??? ;-)

David Weiss said...

That and Age of Empires III ;-)

Anonymous said...

Oh, disappointing. I had read that you could make a new partition without erasing or re-initializing.

Have you checked out DriveGenius? I got it a few months ago because I had a situation hat DiskWarrier couldn't fix - an entire internal drive with 2 partitions had become invisiable and inaccessible. DriveGenius re-scanned and found them. I saw that it ha dthis feature of making new partitions but I hadn't tried it until last week.

It's amazing: it tells you how much free space you have on current aprtitions (I had two), and you can carve out a new partition from any of them, using the free space - you just set the size. It took it all of 20 seconds or so! That must mean that it doesn't use drive space to make a contiguous copy and replace: that would take much lonmger. (It's also good at that, like DW.) I figure it must make a new partition out of non-contiguous space. Maybe I'll do a defrag with DW or DG soon, but in the meantime it just works!

I had thought that Boot Camp might use the same technique, but evidently not...

Anonymous said...

I got the same error on my MBP. Then I realised that I didn't want to give Windows so much ruddy space anyway, so told it to only use 5gb for the Win partition - and it worked with no problems.

Anonymous said...

Is there a possibility of installing windows with C:\ as NTFS and more win drives additionaly using bootcamp?

Thanks

Chris

David Weiss said...

You're going to have to do a fresh install after your earse your partition or partitions. That's what I had to do.

Anonymous said...

@submariner.
i had the same issue. then i just cut down the partition size from 32GB to 20GB. works fine. no need to format - pop up is talking crap!