As a guy that only owns Apple computers yet makes his living working with Visual Studio and .NET languages, I decided that it was past time to start using the Boot Camp feature in OS X. I've been running Windows XP in a virtual machine for several years and have been relatively happy with it. I started out with Parallels Desktop but eventually switched to VMWare Fusion and think it's a great solution for running Windows on a Mac.
I've been working on more projects for work lately at home. This has involved running Windows in VMWare and connecting to our work network over a VPN. Once I started working with fairly large Visual Studio solutions on top of that, I realized that I needed the ability to run Windows natively to stay productive. That's what prompted me to install another hard drive in the PowerMac and setup a Windows 7 Boot Camp partition. I hit a few bumps in the road along the way but found workable solutions. The rest of this post gives the details on what I wanted to accomplish, what I ran into, and how I ultimately got what I wanted.
I started by adding a 1TB Western Digital hard drive and planned to split it up into three partitions. The plan was for a 250 GB Windows 7 partition, a 250 GB shared partition where Windows and OS X could share files, and a 500 GB partition that would just be extra storage on my PowerMac since my existing 320 GB drive was getting pretty full. After adding the drive, I ran Disk Utility to partition and format the drive per my plan. The Windows 7 partition was formatted as a FAT partition (knowing that I would reformat is as NTFS during the Windows 7 install), the shared partition was formatted as ExFAT, and the remaining 500 GB was formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled). I found out later that the way Boot Camp Assistant is intended to be ran doesn't require you to partition/format the drive first but more on that later.
So, on to the Boot Camp Assistant! The Boot Camp Assistant proved to be less than useful in my situation. To be fair, I have since run the Boot Camp Assistant on an iMac at work and it worked flawlessly. However, on my PowerMac, it started getting cranky right out of the gate. The assistant offers to "Download the Windows support software for this Mac" which I figured would ensure I had the latest and greatest drivers for the Windows installation.
Unfortunately, there appears to be a known issue with the Boot Camp assistant on some machines and you're greeted with a message indicating "The Windows support software is not available". This basically means you have to use your OS X installation disc to load the Windows support drivers instead of downloading the latest drivers online. This isn't a problem because after you get your Windows partition setup and running with the drivers from the installation disc, you can use the Apple software updater to then get the latest versions of everything online and it works fine.
Since I had my Mac OS X installation disc, I choose the "I have the Mac OS X installation disc that came with my Mac..." option to continue on with the Boot Camp Assistant. At this point, you only get two options. The first is "Create or remove a Windows partition" and the second is simply "Start the Windows installer". This is where I ran into the next snag. I chose the first option with the assumption that the Boot Camp Assistant needed to create/setup the Boot Camp partition properly. The next screen is where the Boot Camp Assistant and I had to part ways.
If I wanted to install Windows on my primary hard drive that contains OS X, the assistant was willing to create a new partition on that drive and continue. However, if I wanted to use the new hard drive, the Boot Camp Assistant would only let me create a single partition on the drive. There was no option for splitting the drive up into smaller partitions and I really didn't want a 1 TB Windows 7 partition. After some online research, I realized that I was going to have to work outside of the Boot Camp Assistant to finish this up. The process is a bit cumbersome but well worth the effort in my opinion.
I'm sure there are other ways to do this but the process I'm going to describe worked well for me. I suggest you take a few minutes to read over the steps below and if any one of them makes you feel uncomfortable, then this probably isn't for you. If used improperly, disk partitioning utilities can erase your entire hard drive causing you to lose your data. It helps to understand that the Boot Camp Assistant is more or less just a disk partitioning utility. Since it would not let me setup the additional hard drive with the partitions I wanted, I had to handle the disk partitioning myself.
I already mentioned that I had previously partitioned and formatted my new hard drive using Disk Utility. Well, I ended up having to do it again here because I needed to change the Partition Map Scheme. Assuming you've already installed the hard drive into your computer, here are the steps to setup your partitions:
- Open Disk Utility. You'll find it under "Applications", then "Utilities".
- In the left pane, find your new hard drive and highlight it.
- Select the "Partition" menu option at the top of the right pane and you'll see a window similar to this:
- Once on this screen, click on the "Volume Scheme" drop down list and select the number of partitions you want to have (I chose 3).
- Then click on the "Options" button and change the partition scheme to "Master Boot Record" (MBR). This is what Windows is going to need in order to install and be able to boot properly.
- After that, you can click on each partition (currently just labeled Untitled 1, Untitled 2, ....) and name them, select their format and select the desired size. I setup the first partition as my 250 GB Windows partition and formatted it as FAT. It is important to name your Windows partition something obvious so you can easily pick it out when you start installing Windows. I set the second partition as 250 GB and formatted it as ExFAT so it can easily be shared between Windows and OS X. Then I formatted the remaining 500 GB as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) for just OS X use.
- Once you are happy with your choices, click "Apply" and let Disk Utility do its thing. It shouldn't take too long to setup the partitions and quick format them.
The drive itself is now partitioned, formatted and ready to start the Windows installation. It's time to shut down the computer and get our hands dirty inside the case. I chose to open the Boot Camp Assistant one more time and let it know that I was going to install Windows. I'm not positive, but I believe this step is what allows VMWare Fusion to see the Boot Camp partition and run it as a virtual machine later. Even if you don't run VMWare Fusion, this step won't hurt anything.
- Open the Boot Camp Assistant again
- Click "Continue"
- Choose the "I have the Mac OS X installation disc...." option and click "Continue"
- Make sure your Windows installation disc is in the drive
- Choose the "Start the Windows installer" option and click "Continue"
Your computer will restart at this point with the expectation that it is going to boot from the CD. What you really want to do is shut down the computer instead. Once the computer is shut off and unplugged, you need to unplug the OS X hard drive inside the case so that the new MBR formatted/partitioned drive is the first drive that Windows sees during the install. I'm assuming that since you already installed your new hard drive that you know how to do this step. Once the hard drive is unplugged, you can continue with the remaining steps below.
- As you turn on your computer, you're going to want to hold down the "C" key so that the computer will startup from your Windows installation disc in the CD-ROM drive.
- Once the installation gets started, you can follow the prompts that Microsoft provides. You'll eventually end up on a screen asking you "Where do you want to install Windows?". I'm assuming you're installing Windows 7 here but other versions of Windows will have similar prompts/screens.
- You're going to select the partition that you created and named for your Windows installation. In Windows 7, you'll get a message stating that Windows cannot be installed to this hard disk space because it needs to be formatted as NTFS. This is what we expect.
- With the proper partition highlighted, you want to click on "Drive options (Advanced)".
- Click "Format" and then click "OK".
- The formatting shouldn't take long. Once complete, click "Next".
Now it's time to sit back and follow the Windows installation prompts. When your computer restarts (which it may do more than once), you will likely have to hold down the "Option" key on your keyboard during the restart so that your computer will ask you what drive/partition to boot from. Select the Windows disk/partition and let the Windows installation complete. If you miss your opportunity to hold down the "Option" key, don't panic. Your computer will probably just be sitting there with a black screen and a blinking cursor. All you have to do is restart again and make sure to hold down that "Option" key this time. After the Windows installation has completed, you want to install the OS X Boot Camp Utilities. Do this by inserting your OS X installation disc and running the setup utility while in Windows. This will load all the necessary hardware drivers so that your Mac hardware works in Windows. It will also give you the option of installing the Apple Software Update Utility. I recommend installing this and running it to get the very latest drivers from Apple.
At this point, you can shut down your computer and plug back in your OS X hard drive. When you power back up, OS X should start normally. The only way to reboot into Windows at this point is to hold down the "Option" key after powering on your computer and selecting the Windows partition to boot from. Once in Windows, if you want to, you can use the Boot Camp utility to set the Windows partition as your primary startup disk. If you do this, your Mac will always boot directly into Windows instead of OS X. You can easily change this setting by opening Boot Camp in Windows and changing it back to OS X. You cannot do the same thing from OS X unfortunately. This is the one major caveat to installing Windows the way this post describes. Booting to Windows requires either holding down the "Option" key or changing the setting in the Windows version of the Boot Camp Utility. As you get used to doing it this way, I think you'll find that it just isn't an issue. I have no complaints doing it this way.
The last thing I'll point out is that when using VMWare Fusion in OS X, you can boot into your new Windows partition just like any other Virtual Machine on your computer. VMWare will identify the Boot Camp partition automatically and give you the option of starting it up inside OS X. This is extremely useful when you want to use something in Windows but don't want to reboot. Yet when you do reboot into Windows, it's all the same Windows system.
I hope this helps somebody else out that finds themselves in the same situation I did. Let me know if you find any issues in these steps. I wrote them after I had already gone through the process but I believe I covered all the major points.