ricardocabellov5.5

Last Saturday I was reinstalling the OS on my MacBook Pro, and what was my surprise when after reinstalling Tiger, and ready to install Windows using Bootcamp, I found out that Bootcamp wasn't available as beta/free download anymore. Right.

One solution was to use a virtualisation software such as Parallels, but the license was quite expensive (if you compare it to Leopard's Family Pack). So after a bit of thinking I went to the Apple Store and bough a Family Pack of Leopard as we have a couple of macs at home. Went back home, and installed Leopard. I wonder why does it take THAT LONG to install the OS. Anyway, I did the usual bootcamp thing after installing Leopard (without even looking at any of the stupid new features), and what was, again, my surprise that it didn't work. The bootcamp assistant lets you re-partition the space as usual, but this time doesn't warn you that if you put more than 32GB for Windows then you will need to format it as NTFS as Windows can't handle >32GB FAT32 partition, and at the same time MacOS can't read NTFS. Anyways, it lets you partition the HD to 50 and then it does a FAT32 partition by default, which, at the end, doesn't work.

While installing Windows at some point it says Disk Error with FAT32, if you try formating the partition to NTFS it says that the file HAL.DLL is missing or something. And Seemed that I wasn't the only one having that issue anyway.

What an interesting move Apple did here, gave Bootcamp for free for a while as a beta, then when you depend of it, expires, and they make you buy the new OS with that feature broken. Enjoy my money Apple.

Conclusion: Install Windows XP only, get rid of MacOS.

So, as I don't care much about MacOS, I decided that the best would be to reformat everything in a Windows readable formatting and installing Window XP. For doing this you need to:

Important: You'll delete ALL DATA of your HD, so you better do a backup before doing any of this.

1. Restart the machine from Tiger/Leopard install DVD
2. Go directly to Tools/Disk Utility
3. Select 1 partition and chose "Free Space" as format type
4. Click on Options... and select Master Boot record
5. Close the window and click Apply/Partition
6. Exit from the installer and reboot the computer with a Windows installer CD/DVD (pressing the Alt key)
7. After installing the OS, you'll need a Leopard CD for installing the hardware drivers.
8. Enjoy.

I know, I know, mac fans... I'm using an Apple branded PC without MacOS on it. I wanted to have it installed for testing the mac version of flash browser plugin, but Apple didn't let me to, so blame Apple.

The good thing here is that, if you don't need MacOS much, you can avoid buying Leopard, tho you'll need someone to let you the CD so you can install the drivers for the hardware.

I would asume that you should even be able to install Linux in that way, but I think you will have to wait a bit as the actual version (i'm talking about Ubuntu here) doesn't have the drivers fully ready.