Would this method be better than Boot Camp???

[Terrier]

Following my recent post about how my MacBook went belly up precisely in the middle of my efforts to download SP3 for Windows XP, and the Apple Store said it needed a new HD, I was offered this suggestion: partition the HD on your own using Disk Utility.

It seems to make sense, but I'd dearly love some other knowledgeable person's input before I committed to doing this.

Here was the recommendation:

If this fellow has it right, it seems a simple thing to do and it leaves
me wondering then why did Apple go the Boot Camp route instead of providing instructions like these.

Lastly, anyone know what he means in the last paragraph when he writes of "refitting bootloader?

************
Say you have a hard drive with 2000 blocks. When you want to create a
Windows partition, what Boot Camp does is slice the amount you requested to make a free space to create a new partition.

If your HFS partition is taking all 2000 blocks, (say you select 50/50) it
will recreate the HFS partition basic data to reflect 1000 blocks. You now
have 1000 blocks free, which Boot Camp basically creates a new partition but in FAT format.

When that fails, your HFS partition basic data becomes corrupt and causes filesystem errors. Boot Camp when it fails to complete this process, it does not step back to set the partition as it originally was, instead it leaves the unfinished partition info causing the filesystem to become unstable or just downright unusable sometimes giving you the little ? mark at startup because the system cannot find a valid OS X partition.

It would be smarter, before you install OS X, that you load up the startup DVD/CD and under Disk Utility create two partitions. One in HFS Extended (Journaled) and another in FAT. Once that's done, go ahead and install OS X in the HFS Extended partition you created. Once your installation is done in your desktop you will notice the FAT disk available.

So if you had a 40GB HD, you will see a 20GB HFS (Mac partition) and a empty 20GB FAT (windows partition).

From there you can try installing Windows again and the FAT partition you created will be available under the Windows setup menu. If you are still experiencing issues, be advised your HFS partition was never touched by Boot Camp, because you created it manually. So you should have no issues getting on to OS X desktop.

The firmware bootloader to select operating systems is holding down the
option key right after the chime. Another and better alternative is refit
bootloader which pops up a menu that you can select which OS you request to boot up in without the delay the firmware bootloader provides as it searches for other OSes installed on the system.

Finally, this fellow added:

Bootcamp does the process differently, it tampers with your HFS partition in real time to allow to create a new partition. This is a delicate process, it's not that it cannot be done without issues, it's just that the expansion utility does not always work properly. Bootcamp is still rather new and still needs some work to be done to further stabilize it. Once the expansion utility works as intended it would more than likely be included in Disk Utility as a advanced option to increase or decrease partitions on the fly.

Many thanks for any replies,
Bob

[DeltaMac]

That article is several months old - from before Leopard's release. Leopard now will re-partition a hard drive on the fly, without booting to another boot disk. BootCamp is still used because it provides a special boot-loader as part of its partition process, so the Windows installer CD can boot the Mac, bypassing the need for a BIOS, which the Intel Mac does not have.

anyone know what he means in the last paragraph when he writes of "refitting bootloader?

The article does not refer to 'refitting' but used the word 'refit'.
Refit is referring to some special bootmenu software, and was not capitalized properly. It is actually rEFIt, and comes from this web site: http://refit.sourceforge.net/


The normal process to install a bootable version of Windows still depends mainly on Boot Camp. Doing a bootable partition for Windows any other way is not supported by Apple.

[Terrier]

Thanks very much for that clear explanation. The thrust of the article seemed to make sense to someone like myself who is not familiar with the method.

Your clarification leads me to stick with Boot Camp when I get my MacBook back.

As I have your attention, may I ask; do you have a preference for Boot Camp or VM Fusion, or Crossover, or Parallels?

Thanks, again. Bob

[DeltaMac]

I would just point out the main distinctions -
Boot Camp is good, but requires you to restart every time you go from Mac OS to Windows, and return.
Parallels allows you to run Windows (or a large variety of other OSes) as an application, while the Mac OS continues to run normally. Does a good job using Windows, and performance with Windows is not much different from the Boot Camp option for most apps. A gamer would prefer Boot Camp, as video performance for a lot of games is much better when you are booted to Windows.
VMWare Fusion is similar to Parallels, with Windows running as an Application in Mac OS.
The two companies are competitors, but I think Parallels has the better result. VMWare is preparing to release a brand new version, so watch them.
Parallels also will let you use a Boot Camp Windows partition as the Windows used by Parallels. So, you can do Windows both ways (but not at the same time, eh?) Booting to windows in Parallels is much quicker than rebooting into your Boot Camp partition.
I think VMWare has the same sort of choice.
The last is Crossover, which allows you to run a variety of Windows apps, without Windows. The apps that are supported are OK, but the list is limited. I don't hear too much from Crossover, like updates, etc, and maybe that's not a good sign.

Some of the above is my views, and not necessarily complete. Maybe it will help you decide.

[Terrier]

Talking to colleagues at work about running Windows on a Mac, someone asked if I had ever heard of VirtualBox.

Here's what Wikipedia says about it

»en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VirtualBox

Supported host operating systems include Linux, Mac OS X, OS/2 Warp
(experimental OSE builds),[1] Windows, and Solaris/OpenSolaris.

You ever hear of VirtualBox???

Bob

[DeltaMac]

Yes, I've heard of it, but no experience. It's one of many similar products that can run on a variety of OSes, and provide a multiple choices for guest OSes.
Here's a wikopedia page that list a lot of those. Most don't support the Mac OS.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compari...rtual_machines

[djrobx]

Originally Posted by DeltaMac

I would just point out the main distinctions -
Boot Camp is good, but requires you to restart every time you go from Mac OS to Windows, and return.
Parallels allows you to run Windows (or a large variety of other OSes) as an application, while the Mac OS continues to run normally. Does a good job using Windows, and performance with Windows is not much different from the Boot Camp option for most apps.

I have both VMware and Parallels, and find the UI responsiveness of each to be pretty atrocious. Obviously light years better than what we had with PPCs, but still nowhere near what you get when you boot directly into the OS via Boot Camp.

Parallels/VMWare is very handy to have, don't get me wrong, but they really need to focus on display performance. If I need to do any serious work with Windows I don't think I could stand to do it through a VM for very long. To me it feels ike using an old PC without a hardware accelerated video driver. And this is on a Mac Pro.

If you set up XP or Vista on Boot Camp first, you can then use Parallels or VMWare to access that same Boot Camp install from within OSX. I think that gives you the best of both worlds.

[Viro]

Originally Posted by Terrier

You ever hear of VirtualBox???

Yes.

It's fairly good for a free product. Since Sun has purchased it, you can bet it will remain free for a very long time and the development pace can only get better.

The current state o Virtual Box reminds me of the state Parallels was in a year ago. That's not a bad thing, but it means that there is room for improvement. Definitely give it a go before trying out the other options that cost money.