January 12, 2009 in Mac by kerry

My Boot Camp Experiences

Over the last few weeks I’ve been using VMWare Fusion to run a copy of XP on my Macbook Pro so I could do some C# development. This has been working pretty well but VMWare sometimes suffers from my lack of memory (all my money goes to Jeep upgrades so I’m running with 2gb). I was mentioning this to a friend on IRC when he stated that Boot Camp is free and I should give it a try. I was under the impression that Boot Camp had a cost associated with it so armed with the knowledge that running XP natively on my mac wouldn’t cost me anything I dug up my Leopard and XP install disks and set about the install process.

The supplied Boot Camp instructions are pretty clear and the process seemed pretty straight forward… little did I know. Shortly after launching the Boot Camp assistant it reported back with some cryptic error about how I should backup my data to another Mac and reinstall then launch the assistant again. I did a few google searches and found out that to remedy this I could defragment my drive. This was news to me since I was under the impression that OSX automatically defraged my drive but after a little research it turns out it only auto-defrags files under 20MB… anything above is considered abnormal usage.

I did a little more searching and found a tool called idefrag that would clean up my drive and even compact it so Boot Camp would have no problems when it came time to partition. For some reason I was unable to create a bootable idefrag disk and after much frustration ended up backing my important documents and photo’s up to Mozy and blew away my installation of OSX.

Once I had a fresh OSX copy the Boot Camp assistant worked like a charm and within a few minutes I was happily browsing around in my new XP installation. I was very pleased that Boot Camp handled all of the driver installation, if only it was smart enough to partition my original drive.