OSX and Bootcamp question

[Hondamaker]

If I decide to put windows on my iMac, when it creates the partition, will it delete and reformat my hard drive to do so?

[geordisjd]

If I decide to put windows on my iMac, when it creates the partition, will it delete and reformat my hard drive to do so?

I don't know what you mean about "delete", but it will partition a given portion of your HD (say 5 GB, that's what I used when I had bootcamp and reformat it so you can install Windows and run it native), and of course, that won't be available to the Mac part.

[Hondamaker]

I don't know what you mean about "delete", but it will partition a given portion of your HD (say 5 GB, that's what I used when I had bootcamp and reformat it so you can install Windows and run it native), and of course, that won't be available to the Mac part.well, you know how when you create a partition in windows the whole HDD is reformatted during the process.

[geordisjd]

well, you know how when you create a partition in windows the whole HDD is reformatted during the process.

I don't know anything about partitions in windows, but the Mac only formats the number of GB's that you'll assign to bootcamp. the rest of your mac stuff will be fine.

[depthnerd]

No it will dedicate a section of unused space to make room for Windows. And when i set up partitions on my old Windows machine it didn't format anything.

[acosmichippo]

if you format the windows partition as FAT32, you CAN read and write to it in OSX.

also, ifyour hard drive is relatively full, OSX may not be able to create a partition.

[Hondamaker]

So, what you're all saying is that I can put Windows on my mac using Boot Camp, and I won't lose any current data.

[acosmichippo]

correct. worst case scenario is the bootcamp assistant won't be able to partition the HD because there are too many files it can't move... and then you're just back to where you started.

[Hondamaker]

Awesome, thanks for everyone's help!

[depthnerd]

Well you'll need a guide on how to do it, actually. There are certain things you have to do to get it working properly on Boot Camp.

http://labnol.blogspot.com/2006/04/boot-camp-tutorial-install-windows-xp.html

[acosmichippo]

bootcamp comes with a guide that has all the info you'd ever need. It will ask you if you want to print it out.

and the guide you posted is probably for the Beta version of bootcamp. You don't have to burn a Drivers disc now; you just use OSX Disc 1.

[depthnerd]

bootcamp comes with a guide that has all the info you'd ever need.
They don't mention the FAT32 formatting - which is dire.

[acosmichippo]

yes they do.

[depthnerd]

Wait - what the hell am I talking about? Where do you see a part where Boot Camp mentions anything?

[acosmichippo]

maybe they updated it since you last looked at it...

http://i15.photobucket.com/albums/a393/acosmicfriend/bc.jpg

[depthnerd]

I've never seen that in my life....ever.

[acosmichippo]

obviously :)

[Hondamaker]

Just did it! Windows XP on my mac. Just for ****s and giggles, not for any real reason, except maybe to play BF2142 on the mac.

[SpongebObiWan]

I have a question. I am about to receive my very first Apple computer ever: an iMac 24", 3.06 GHz, 4GB RAM, 1TB Hard drive, etc. I also purchased Parallels and a new copy of WindowsXP. Obviously, I want to set up a partition for my Windows to run some programs on. And I see that if I want to be able to write files from my OS X to the Windows partition, I need to select FAT32. What caught my eye is the 32GB partition limitation size. I was considering creating a partition on the order of 150 to 200 GB as I have a lot of Windows programs I will be bringing over.

Am I truly limited to a 32GB partition for all my Windows software and programs, if I want to create a FAT32 partition? This does not seem nearly enough for my needs. Are there no workarounds for this? Any help?

[acosmichippo]

are you only going to be using parallels?

if so, you have much more versatility, because a separate partition is not needed.

sounds like a sweet machine, btw.

[geordisjd]

are you only going to be using parallels?

if so, you have much more versatility, because a separate partition is not needed.

sounds like a sweet machine, btw.

For me, Parallels is good enough. I just need it for a few tasks, and it performs faithfully (office scheduling and hospital access).

I'm not limited to any number of GB's. It expands as it is needed. And I have a lot of room for expansion.

Past that, all I need is a Mac :smile:.

[acosmichippo]

i may have worded that poorly, but that's pretty much what i was saying. If you stick with parallels, you won't have to worry about being limited to a partition.

[SpongebObiWan]

are you only going to be using parallels?

if so, you have much more versatility, because a separate partition is not needed.

sounds like a sweet machine, btw.

Thanks, I'm really quite excited. Anyway, I'm really a noob about Mac's so I'm not sure I understand what you're asking: "are you only going to be using parallels?" Are you saying that if I use Parallels, I will not even need to create a separate partition for my WindowsXP operating system and all my other Windows programs that I want to run on the iMac? If so, I didn't even realize that. In that case, I guess you are saying that I have no limitation to how much disk space I will need for Windows programs, etc, and don't need to even worry about whether or not I use FAT32 or not? Correct me if I am wrong, and forgive my complete ignorance about this. :laugh2:

EDIT: Ugh!! Sorry. I didn't read the rest of the posts relating to this AFTER your post to me, UNTIL I had posted the above. I think my question was already answered. Thanks so much. I am tracking the shipment of my iMac about every hour or so..hahaha..and it looks like it will arrive by Friday.

[acosmichippo]

that's exactly right.

what programs are you needing to run in windows? If they're relatively undemanding, Parallels will be fine for you.

[SpongebObiWan]

that's exactly right.

what programs are you needing to run in windows? If they're relatively undemanding, Parallels will be fine for you.

Some of them are Yahoo chat clients that I use for chat (OTHER then Messenger. I know there is a Mac Yahoo Messenger) and other related chat programs. That's just the first thing that came to mind that I know I won't be able to find a Mac version for. I also live and die by MS Outlook, and I was considering that I really needed that on my iMac. I know there is a Mac version of Office, but it doesn't have Outlook that I can see. However, having said that, and after what little research I have been doing, I might not even need Outlook after all. I might be much better off using the programs that come with OS X and merely migrating my data into those programs. I will have to take it step by step as I begin to set this up and see exactly what I will need in the way of Windows programs.

Who knows? Maybe I'm going to be pleasantly surprised and discover that some of the programs I run on Windows, I will actually be able to run on OS X. As I said, I know hardly anything about Mac's and OS X. My "learning curve" awaits me.

[acosmichippo]

sounds like parallels will be just fine.

The mac Office has "Entourage" instead of Outlook. I'm not sure exactly what the differences are, though. The Mac Mail is more than adequate for my needs.

[SpongebObiWan]

sounds like parallels will be just fine.

The mac Office has "Entourage" instead of Outlook. I'm not sure exactly what the differences are, though. The Mac Mail is more than adequate for my needs.
Well, if I can migrate all my contact info and all my old e-mails into whatever OS X has to offer, I can live with that. My past e-mails are my lifeline to just about everything I do. I keep Outlook open as I am constantly going in there looking for some information from the past few years to do something I need to do in the present.

[acosmichippo]

in that case, new macs come with a trial version of Office, which i'm pretty sure includes Entourage. So give Mail and Entourage a try, and if neither works for you, then there's always Outlook.

[SpongebObiWan]

Thanks so much. One other question just occurred to me. Since I know have my PC set up with iTunes and my iPhone, how will I be able to set up my iMac to be the primary iTunes "recipient?" for my iPhone instead of my PC, without losing anything on my iPhone. I am concerned that once I connect my iPhone to my new iMac and start up iTunes, it will give me that message that this is not the computer my iPhone is set up on, and if I attempt to sync, I will lose the stuff on my iPhone.

[acosmichippo]

right. If you sync your iPhone with your iMac, you will lose all media (videos, music, etc). Your contacts, though, can be merged onto your iMac. When you sync, you'll get a popup message asking you if you want to overwrite the contacts of your iPhone with those on the computer , or merge the iphone contacts with the iMac contacts. If you choose "Merge", the contacts from your iPhone will be synced to Mail by default. After the initial sync, you can choose another mail client to sync with (like entourage).

So, music and movies you will have to transfer directly from your old computer, but contacts (and pictures, i think) will transfer fine.

[Lincoln]

I have a question as well. I failed at setting up a virtual machine on my Mac Mini because it doesn't have enough memory, so I'm using Boot Camp. Here's my question, pretty much the opposite of Honda's: Say I decide I don't want Windows anymore. I know I can remove the partition in Boot Camp, and I know that removing it will remove all the files on the Windows partition, but will everything on my Mac partition stay there?

- John

[acosmichippo]

yep. I had to do that once already. Worked fine.

[SpongebObiWan]

iMac arrived late Saturday afternoon and is up and running. But oh my gosh this is HUGE..lol. I've managed to install parallels after a little bit of trial and error, and installed WindowsXP after a little more trial and error. And I have downloaded and installed a couple of my most frequently used Windows programs (yahoo chat clients). I've also installed the Mac versions of Yahoo Messenger and Skype and they are very different. I am not able to find all the Preference and Option settings that I am used to having on the Windows versions.

Through my home wireless network (which I must say was practically effortless to set up with the iMac) I was able to transfer all the music from my PC over into iTunes on the iMac. I wanted to do this before I sync my iPhone for the first time. I suppose I will have to go through all my music and set the rating on each song as I did on the PC before, so that only the music already loaded on the iPhone from my PC will sync, unless there is some easier way to import that setting from my PC.

One other thing I am dealing with is not having the right-click mouse function that I am used to having with Windows. I am at loss to know how to simulate the right-click function on the Mighty Mouse as I am accustomed to doing with the PC. Using that function with Windows, I am frequently given a drop down menu from which I can chose other options or settings from and now I am unable to access those options or settings without having a right mouse button to click.

[geordisjd]

One other thing I am dealing with is not having the right-click mouse function that I am used to having with Windows. I am at loss to know how to simulate the right-click function on the Mighty Mouse as I am accustomed to doing with the PC. Using that function with Windows, I am frequently given a drop down menu from which I can chose other options or settings from and now I am unable to access those options or settings without having a right mouse button to click.[/QUOTE]

Get one of these:

http://www.trackballworld.com/media/products/ss_size1/40-165.jpg

Mighty or not, the Apple mouse is not my favorite. I bought 10 of the Logitech trackballs for all my computers, new and old, even for my MBA. I leave them at work, even in the on-call room, so I'm never without my trackball wherever I am. they're very smooth and precise. The kids (all 4 of them) are addicted to it too. They're only $20 and you can RIGHT-CLICK all you want.

[Lincoln]

I swear, I'm just not meant to run Windows. When I try to partition the drive in Boot Camp, giving Windows 10 GB, I am told that I need to backup my disk, reformat my disk to a single Mac OS Extended (Journaled) drive and then Restore my disk. I can create backups with Roxio's backup utility, but my disk is already formatted as descried above. And I really don't want to erase and restore my disk.

- John

[Lincoln]

What fun this is. After repairing my disk's permissions, I was able to get Boot Camp to start partitioning. However, 1/4 of the way through the process, I get a scary error message telling me that I need to reboot my computer. I figured I had screwed my Mac, but it booted successfully. I was prompted to send a report to Apple, which I did. I looked it up and found that I should repair my drive, so I'll do that now.

Hopefully I don't really screw the Mac.

- John

[acosmichippo]

iMac arrived late Saturday afternoon and is up and running. But oh my gosh this is HUGE..lol. I've managed to install parallels after a little bit of trial and error, and installed WindowsXP after a little more trial and error. And I have downloaded and installed a couple of my most frequently used Windows programs (yahoo chat clients). I've also installed the Mac versions of Yahoo Messenger and Skype and they are very different. I am not able to find all the Preference and Option settings that I am used to having on the Windows versions.

Through my home wireless network (which I must say was practically effortless to set up with the iMac) I was able to transfer all the music from my PC over into iTunes on the iMac. I wanted to do this before I sync my iPhone for the first time. I suppose I will have to go through all my music and set the rating on each song as I did on the PC before, so that only the music already loaded on the iPhone from my PC will sync, unless there is some easier way to import that setting from my PC.

One other thing I am dealing with is not having the right-click mouse function that I am used to having with Windows. I am at loss to know how to simulate the right-click function on the Mighty Mouse as I am accustomed to doing with the PC. Using that function with Windows, I am frequently given a drop down menu from which I can chose other options or settings from and now I am unable to access those options or settings without having a right mouse button to click.

that's very unusual. We have a couple mighty mice at work that do right-click just fine on windows machines. Like Geordi mentioned, there is the option to use a different mouse. I personally like the Logitech MX revolution.

[SpongebObiWan]

My bad! I found the setting to get a right-click function out of my mighty mouse. Learning curve blues :tounge:

Other than that my amazement seems renewed each day with this iMac as I figure out ways (some much better) to replicate functions and activities I did on a daily basis with my Windows machine. And actually, I really haven't had a lot of time to "play" yet, as I've mostly been spending my time migrating information over from my old PC through my shared network. I have a feeling just from the playing I have done so far, that once I finish this task and really get to play with this I'm going to enjoy this machine much more then I ever enjoyed a PC.

[SpongebObiWan]

Just an update. I am enjoying my iMac immensely. The "learning curve" seems to be rather intuitive, rather then needing to look for or read lots of documentation. I like that.

My MS Outlook problem was resolved rather simply. Since I installed Parallels and then WindowsXP anyway, installing the Windows version of MS Office was the simplest solution. True, I don't have all my past emails (prior to iMac day) in Mail this way. But I learned that migrating all of that from Outlook to Entourage was a rather complex and not altogether guaranteed process, requiring it first to be exported into Outlook Express, then doing something with it, and then getting it into Entourage. I still wouldn't have it in Mail anyway and some data that I wanted could not be migrated even into Entourage. So I concluded this solution was more acceptable as well as being much simpler. Since I have the Windows open all the time anyway there is really no problem with it.

One of the first differences that I noticed between Windows and OS X, is in removing a program. With Windows you first must go to control panel, then to "add or remove programs", find your program and remove it there. Then oftentimes, you must go into your "Program Files" directory, and look to see if a folder for that program remains and if there are any files left over in it, which then also have to be deleted. On top of that there are certain instances when remnants of the program still exist in the registry and need to be somehow "cleaned" from there as well if they interfere in some way. With OS X, I simply right click and "Move to Trash" and eventually "Empty the Trash Bin". The simplicity of this compared to Windows is almost laughable. I'm sure I have just scratched the surface here with my own new discoveries.

To be continued.........

[acosmichippo]

yeah, windows and the registry are severely outdated.

anyway, i'm surprised the migration from outlook to entourage isn't a lot easier... that's the whole point of office for mac, right?

[SpongebObiWan]

anyway, i'm surprised the migration from outlook to entourage isn't a lot easier... that's the whole point of office for mac, right?

True. You would think so, wouldn't you? But, then again, when taking into consideration who's product Office for Mac is, (covers mouth) microsoft, perhaps therein lies the problem. :tounge:

[SpongebObiWan]

After running Parallels for a few weeks now, I have decided to take a look at VMWare Fusion as an alternative. I'm wondering if anybody else has used both programs also and what your conclusions might be.

On somewhat of a side note, in going through the above process, I am again reminded of just how much I am really beginning to hate Windows and Microsoft more and more with each passing day. When setting up the VMWare Fusion and installing my WindowsXP Home Edition, I got the expected "you have 30 days to activate" message. Upon going to the Microsoft site to activate I of course got the also somewhat expected "kiss of death" message "this software has already exceeded the allowable number of activations" <--translated, means ONE, as the activation done when installing my copy of WindowsXP under Parallels is the ONLY activation I made. They REALLY know how to alienate their buying public.

[up10ad]

VMWare rocks. Get the new beta. It is so much better than Parallels.

I have MS Office on my Mac and absolutely hate Entourage. It won't even do HTML in email messages! I use Mail. And I love Office on my Vista systems. Go figure. I am very disappointed in Mac Office.

[acosmichippo]

I also prefer fusion over parallels. I think the amount of features are about the same, but fusion runs 10x better.

[Kabeyun]

I've been using Parallels practically since the beginning, but I'd be interested in why y'all like Fusion better. Parallels has done a good job evolving their product (as has VMWare), but their customer service is pretty stinky. Also, the app occasionally quits, but fortunately has not affected the VM at all. If the arguments are strong, I may switch over when I get my new laptop (whenever that is).

-K

[acosmichippo]

the best way to describe it is it just runs smoother... and i have never had it quit, freeze, or crash on me... and i've been using it for about 2-3 months now.

you can probably try out the new Beta for free, if you're interested..

[SpongebObiWan]

you can probably try out the new Beta for free, if you're interested..

You CAN, and I AM. :tounge: 30 day trial. The first difference I noticed is that the initial install and setup of the VM (WindowsXP Home Edition, in my case) seemed quite a bit less confusing and less user input required. Other then that, I've only noticed small differences so far, mainly in the features offered and layout, etc. For example, you can set VMWare Fusion to run both processors, where as you cannot do so with Parallels. I haven't noticed any significant speed difference as of yet, even with the two processors, but I admit to not yet running anything processor or memory intensive. I set the memory to 1536MB on both Parallels and VMWare Fusion (I have 4GB on my iMac so I have no shortage of memory).
On a side note, I recall somebody here informing me that I could make the hard disk size "adjustable" enabling it to grow with my needs. Perhaps I am missing something here and if so, please enlighten me. But on Parallels, I only found where the maximum HD space allowed was 32GB, and yes, the HD space DOES grow with your needs, but only up to that maximum. VMWare Fusion has a setting adjustment allowing greater then 32GB maximum and I set it at 100GB. If I am mistaken about this, I'd be happy to be made aware of it.