I just got a Mac Book Pro at work. A coworker and I are evaluating and comparing virtual machines versus native installs of Windows. Beside the utter feeling of shame for jamming Windows on to my nice new pristine Mac, here are my findings from making Boot Camp work.

At the time of this documentation, Boot Camp is in Beta at version 1.3, is freely available for download, and is targeted to be released with the next version of OSX. Though the installation and use of Boot Camp is fairly straight forward, this technique would only be recommended for users requiring the use of a windows operating system running natively for use in
such tasks as video editing, heavy data analysis and computation tasks.

Overview of Process

What Boot Camp Does.

Boot Camp allows a user to easily, and non-destructively repartition their hard drive to make space to install additional operating systems such as windows, or Linux. It also provides drivers to be burned to disk, or written to a folder on a hard drive to be installed in your Windows Operating system so it can recognize the Mac hardware properly.

Installing Boot Camp

After downloading Boot Camp from the Apple site, you install it by running the install Boot Camp Assistant package. This setup will prepare your Mac for use with Boot Camp. After installation you will need to run the Boot Camp Assistant that is installed under applications\utilities.

Boot Camp Assistant

The Boot Camp assistant serves several purposes. The first time you run it, it will remind the user that the software is in Beta and is for temporary use. It will also provide you with the opportunity to print the Boot Camp Installation Manual, which is highly recommended.

The assistant will also prompt the user to burn a CD of drivers which will be used in the Windows operating system. This step can be skipped if you already have the drivers burned to CD, or if you do not have blank media at the time.

The user then is presented with a screen with which they decide how much space on the hard drive to make available to your secondary operating system. The default setting is 5gigs. There are options for predefined amounts such as 32 gigs, or an even split of available free space between Mac and Other. The user can also specify a custom amount of drive space to use.

Once your selection is made, the assistant non-destructively reparations the space, or in Boot Camp terms, resizes the Mac’s drive size to make room for another operating system.

When done, the assistant prompts for the install CD/DVD for the new OS to be inserted, or to return to the finder.

If the user chooses to install another OS at that time, the machine reboots and installation of the operating system (Windows XP, Vista, etc) takes place the same as installing the operating system on any PC.

Other uses for the Boot Camp Assistant

Once you have run the assistant, you can return to it to burn a copy of the driver CD if you did not do so earlier, or if you misplaced your driver CD. You can also start the windows installer, if you chose not to start it when initially running the assistant. Or you can use the assistant to return your hard drive to it’s original state, erasing the secondary partition.

Dual Booting

Choosing the next OS to run

Once you have run the assistant and installed your desired operating system, it is best to install the drivers that you burned. Beside installing drivers for the hardware in your mac, they will also provide a control panel option that will allow you to choose which operating system will boot the next time you start the machine. This also seems to set the default operating system to run when turning on the computer.

Choosing the OS at start up

When you turn on the machine, you can also choose the desired OS by holding the option key. The user will be presented with graphical representations of available operating systems. Simply click on the icon of the drive representing the desired OS and click the arrow that appears bellow it.

Analysis

Boot Camp is free for Operating systems and Macs that meet the requirements making it an attractive option for users to run multiple operating systems on their Mac.

The install process is simple, if you follow the directions.

I attempted many different scenarios for installing both Vista Business and XP Pro. Using XP partition tools, may result in an inability to boot the computer to any operating system. The OSX setup disks were able to repair this issue, but it is not a guarantee that they would be able to overcome this mistake in every iteration.

Installing XP, then Vista as a dual boot in the windows environment (in reality triple boot) appeared to work until trying to boot Windows XP. With my experience with dual booting PCs with Windows OS, I believe that to be an issue with the Vista installer, but I did not spend time diagnosing the problem.

The simple solution was to go back into Mac OSX and restore the drive to original state and install Vista on it’s own. Then using VirtualPC 2007, which is freely available from Microsoft, I installed Windows XP Pro as a virtual machine in Vista.

Using Boot Camp differs from virtualization using Parallels or VMware Fusion, in that if you want to use the other operating system, you need to restart the computer.

In Mac OSX, the partition in which Windows is installed appears as a second hard drive. In Windows, the Mac drive can be found using Disk Management tools, but it did not appear that I would be able to mount it without causing damage to the Mac partition. I did not attempt connect to the drive out of fear of needing to rebuild the Mac.

Viability

Dual booting the Mac using Boot Camp is a viable solution to running multiple operating systems. It provides you the full power of the hardware to your operating system, and is relatively simple to set up.

Efficiency

Clearly, needing to reboot your machine to complete a simple task in Windows is not very efficient, unless you need the full power of your hardware.

Recommendation

From my experiences, and the results from my coworker experimenting with Parallels, Boot Camp is not recommended for the general computer user. If you need to share files between the operating systems, and need access to a few tools in Windows, while working in OSX, Parallels, or another virtualization tool is by far the better solution.

If you have need for Windows to run natively, for full power, Boot Camp will work well for you.

Other Options

VMware is developing a virtualization tool to run in Mac OS called Fusion. At this time, it can be preordered for $40, and when released will be similarly priced as Parallels.

A third option to virtualization I discovered in this process is a product called Q (http://www.kju-app.org/kju/) which offers a free virtualization environment, which is currently in Beta. I have not yet personally evaluated either of these solutions, but will look forward to working with Q at some point to see if it will work.

UPDATE: IT appears that because Windows and Mac handle time differently, my Mac is unable to keep the correct time. From what I have found the solutions are varied, the best sounding though is to get rid of windows. ;-P I found a lot of info here. That confirmed that the reason my clock was reseting to show an AM hour and correct minutes was due to Boot Camp and Windows use.