Adventures in Boot Camp

Wow. It’s a long time since I updated this blog. Either I’ve been busy, or perhaps I just had nothing to say. Well, today I thought I’d share my experience of putting Windows 7 on my MacBook, in Boot Camp. It may be useful to someone…

It seems like a good idea to have Windows on your Mac as an option, and Boot Camp is supposed to make it easy. I’ve previously set up virtual machines but sometimes that’s not enough and so I eventually took the plunge with Boot Camp. I even remembered to print out the Boot Camp instructions as prompted before starting (you should do this, although they are available on line if you can access a second computer should you need them).

First thing to note is that almost straight away Boot Camp bowled a googly (that’s a cricket analogy – if you’re American it loosely translates as ‘threw a curve ball’). The dialog gives you the option of downloading all the drivers it will need – but when you do this it fails. Apparently it always fails, so you should ignore this.

Instead, select the option to install from your Mac OSX boot disk; you won’t need to worry about this until after you’ve got Windows set up, so choose that option and carry on…

Next, you get to the bit where you choose how much disk you want to give over to your Windows installation, and then Boot Camp is supposed to partition the disk for you. On my 18 month old MacBook, this generated the following error:

“Your disk cannot be partitioned because some files cannot be moved. Back up the disk and use Disk Utility to format the disk as a single Mac OS Extended (Journaled) volume. Restore your information to the disk and try using Boot Camp Assistant again.”

Whoa there, Apple. Way to scare people.

I’ve got Time Machine backing up my Mac to a network drive, and that’s fine, but I still baulked at the idea of re-formatting the disk and trying to restore everything. Even if it all went fine, it sounds really really scary. And besides, over a network it would take hours/days just to restore…

I hadn’t already partitioned the disk, and also it’s still got plenty of space (nearly 150GB) so fragmentation shouldn’t be the cause of the problem (apparently it can be, in some cases). And disk utility reported some problems when I checked it, but it would not repair.

So I gave up for the day. Annoying. But, next day, some reading on the web, and I find this:

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2414

(you’ll note, not relating to quite the same error message I got, or I would have found it a lot quicker…)

So, boot the Mac with the Mac OSX installation DVD in the drive, and the C key held down – then go into disk utility and repair (you should see this as an option at the top, remember not to actually go and re-install OSX; oh and you might need to press hard on the track pad rather than tap) – this time it worked! After a normal reboot (without the OSX install disk), Boot Camp then worked properly. Partitioned the disk, asked for Windows 7 install disk, set it up, all went well.

If you get to this stage you’ve got it cracked. After that you just need to reboot Windows and remove the Windows DVD (it does eject if you hold the eject key down long enough!) and then put the OSX install DVD back in, it should run automatically, and it will install all the drivers (if you are confused that tapping doesn’t do anything, remember to click by depressing the track pad… you can later change the track pad options via the Boot Camp control panel in the system tray).

At last! Now just remember to hold the Alt key down when you reboot to make Boot Camp appear and give you the option of which OS to boot up into…