My fun with Boot Camp

Boot Camp is Apple’s system for letting one install Windows XP onto a Intel based Mac. Boot Camp partitions your disk into two partitions, one for OS X and one for XP, creates a CD of drivers for XP and then installs XP.

I have a copy of XP that came from the launch. It has no service packs (major updates) so I can’t use it with Boot Camp. The Intel macs require SP2. So I spent $5 and ordered an XP SP 2 CD from Microsoft (how cool of them!). That arrived so I was ready to go.

I run Boot Camp and let it create my CD of drivers for the Mac hardware. Then Boot Camp tries to partition my disk, but it found disk errors! Well thats a nice side effect of this whole process, actually. So I boot into single user mode, run FSCK and I’m all fixed up (geek method which is faster than booting off the OS X installer cd and running Disk Utility)

I reboot and try to partition with Boot Camp again. No go. Now it can’t move some files. (ie, some files are so important to OS X they can’t be moved down into the OS X space so a XP partition can be created)

Well poop. So I boot off my external HD and run Boot Camp. Now it tells me I cannot partition an external disk. So much for that.

Next I run iDefragLite which I had never run, but owned as part of Coriolis’ iPartition package. iDegragLite ran overnight and when I woke up, the hard disk was nicely compacted with a huge block of free space at the end.

So I reboot from the internal drive and run Boot Camp. Success! I now have a 10gb partition all set up for windows.

I whip out my brand new Windows XP SP2 CD, insert it into the Mac and click “Begin Installation” Acccck. No go. “No installer CD found” Sheesh. Ok so I check on the CD and it just installs SP2! Its not a full installer CD, just for the damn service pack.

I run Boot Camp again where it kindly offers to delete Windows XP and restore the 10gb back to my Mac drive. I thank it and accept.