It’s true. Apple announced Boot Camp that allows you to dual boot your Intel base Mac to dual boot to either Mac OS or Windows XP. And it works. I can now boot as a Mac or Windows. And the Windows boot is a real boot. Very very fast, no emulation.
Now before you jump into this (you know, like I did) you should be warned it’s not quite fool proof. The first time I did it I managed to corrupt the Mac partition (it was VERY disturbing to only be able to boot my new Mac laptop into Windows). I think the problem was doing a partition format as part of the Windows install (just choose the Quick Format option). So, make sure you do a good back up before you try this trick. Anyway, the second try worked like a charm and now I can play Star Wars Republic Commando with no problems.
A few notes for the curious:
- This is a dual boot, so you can’t run Mac and Windows simultaneously
- You can access the Windows partition when you are booted in MacOS, but not the other way around
- As part of the process you don’t have to reformat your drive and Boot Camp burns a CD with all the hardware drivers for your Mac hardware
- This only works on the new Intel based Macs
This is very cool, but back up before you procede.
Turns out with MacDrive You can have your cake and eat it too. This software allows you to read and write to the Mac partition while in Windows. This allows you to make a relatively small Windows partition and still have some drive space to save files.