can I install an OS or two in two days?
A LOT apparently. Earlier this week I received my Western Digital 320GB SATA laptop drive from NewEgg to replace the existing 250GB drive. Figured I'd do a clean install again (after already doing one a few weeks back for Leopard) but this time I'd also give Boot Camp a whirl.
Now my typical Mac hard drive setup is to partition it into 3 distinct drives: the main OS partition at 32GB, a separate application partition at 12GB, and whatever space is remaining in the third partition to house my data. Why split them up? So if I need to blow away the OS (like during a new OS X point upgrade) or if anything happens to the system for some reason, I won't have to reinstall my apps and data again. With that in mind, I partitioned my new drive into 4, the aforementioned 3 and then a new 32GB FAT32 partition to install Windows XP SP2 on.
After installing Leopard, I then ran Boot Camp. Problem: Boot Camp Assistant won't do anything unless your hard drive has only ONE PARTITION. !@#$!#$!!!! Fine, not a big deal, I hadn't moved any data into the new drive yet so redoing the partitioning was doable. So I repartitioned to one and let Boot Camp do its thing. So, second time through, I now have Leopard and WinXP installed. Now, how do I set up my other 2 partitions?
One of the features in Leopard that I was excited about was the ability to mess around with existing partitions using Disk Utility without it destroying the data. Of course it's still a good idea to back up before you start playing around but if it worked as advertised for the most part, I'm a happy camper. So, knowing this, my next step was to boot up with the Leopard disc, run Disk Utility and repartition the one big Mac partition into my usual three. And that's exactly what it did. So the whole repartitioning bit worked great. Only problem? I could no longer boot into Windows. If I opened up the Startup Disk preference pane, I could see the Windows partition but if I selected it and then rebooted, I got a "startup disk could not be found" or something to that effect error. Damn, back to the drawing board.
Alright then, screw Boot Camp. With Leopard, the only thing Boot Camp Assistant (BCA) really does for you is create the FAT32 partition that Windows needs to install into. I can do that myself using Disk Utility already so why bother with BCA and its asinine "one partition" only rule? So I booted up with the Leopard disc again, went back to my 4 partition scheme, installed Leopard, and then popped in the WinXP disc and rebooted. Problem, the WinXP installer couldn't see the FAT32 partition that I had set aside for it. What the hell. So maybe BCA was doing something more besides just creating the FAT32 partition?
By this time I was pretty annoyed about the whole situation so I just gave up. Recycled the FAT32 partition into my data partition and resigned myself to just using Parallels as I was before. However, the next day at work I was talking to our IT guy about it and he suggested that I try setting the partition to free space instead and take a look at the Apple Support forums to see if other people were running into the same issue. So that night, I first tried the free space route, no dice. Then I puttered around the support forums but no one was writing about the same situation that I was in. Then I google'd and found this site talking about how to triple boot Windows, Linux and MacOS X. While not exactly what I was trying to do, I found the answer to my problem in this section of the site talking about Disk Partitions and their Limitations.
Basically, Window's legacy MBR partitioning system is only able to see 4 primary partitions. So why wasn't my 4 partition system working? Because Apple reserves the first primary partition for something they call the "EFI System Partition." This extra partition doesn't show up in Disk Utility. You can only see it if you run "diskutil list" from the command line. So you actually only have THREE partitions to work with if you want Windows to install. Long story short, once I merged my applications partition with my main OS partition, THEN the Windows installer was able to see the FAT32 partition set aside for it and install properly.
Thankfully, setting up Parallels to use the WinXP partition directly as a virtual machine was a lot more hassle-free than setting up the WinXP partition in the first place so now I can dual boot Leopard and WinXP and use Parallels to run WinXP and Leopard concurrently. So after installing Leopard at least 5 times and WinXP twice, I'm finally a happy camper. =p
Oh, and the 320GB Western Digital drive? Working like a champ so far. ;-)
