DIY: Dual Boot your mac with Bootcamp


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This is a DIY and pretty much a cake walk if you follow everything nicely.

I am assuming that person doing this is already aware of setting up windows on a normal machine. I will not cover windows installation steps here.

Things you need (or better, things which worked for me, you may try a different setup at your own risk)

1) MacBook with Snowleopard 10.6
2) Bootcamp(already installed if using snowleopard, if not see the link at the bottom how to get it)
3) Windows XP SP2 or higher (If you have a mere window xp cd and sp2 on other disk, it wont work, it needs a bundled version)

That's it!, you are all set to roll!

I am just stating these steps again which I have taken from another source. Will post the link. But I had some "stuck into" points which are not mentioned in that web page.

Ok, so let's start now. The installation pictures are there on the original source page.So no need for me to put pictures here.

1) Goto Menu-->Tools-->Utilities-->Bootcamp Assistant
2) Invoke by double clicking or whatever way you invoke a mac program
3) On the welcome screen you can enjoy reading the page and hit "Continue"
4) This is the most vital part, think, think , think and think how much partition do you want to play with from your entire hard-drive. I just want to play my simulator game on this partition so 4gig for Windows and 4 gig for the game + 2gb extra. That counts to 10gigs. You do your own math if you want to use windows for net surfing and want to put every bell and whistle into it. So, there is a slider on LHS it will show your mac partition and on RHS it will show you how much partition to reserve for windows. Move the slider upon your wish.

Now before going to step 5, here is the 1st problem i got which is not mentioned in the source page.

When I selected 10 gig and hit "Continue" i got an error. "Bootcamp cannot move certain files, try re formatting the drive and install OSX again and other backup and all stuf..".

I searched internet all over and after few unsuccessful tries of doing this and that. This worked for me, so if you come across into a situation like this, try this first before trying anything else. Because this is a mac feature for which you wont have to download anything.

Steps
A) Start Mac in single-user-mode
1. Shut down your Mac if it is on.
2. Press the power button to start the computer.
3. Immediately press and hold the Command (Apple) key and "s" key
B) You will see lots of white on black text doing blah blah blah operations.
C) In the end you will be on the command prompt something like this
root#
D) Type /sbin/fsck -fy
E) It will take time, if everything went well you will see ** The volume (name_of_volume) appears to be OK . If there was something wrong you will see ***** FILE SYSTEM WAS MODIFIED ***** don't worry keep repeating step D untill you see ** The volume (name_of_volume) appears to be OK . I had to run it thrice to get this message.

5) Ok now coming back to the next main step. It will ask you to insert the windows xp installation cd. Put the cd in and hit the "Continue" button. Mac will restart
6) Now you will see something familiar, if you have installed windows before. "Press any key to boot from cd..." hit enter or whatever key and the windows setup will start.
7) On the partition selection menu of windows, you will see your partition created above with drive letter as c:\. Select this.
8) You will now see another option. Format the partion using FAT32 (quick) or NTFS(quick) choose here FAT32(quick)

Now my 2nd problem, if after step 7 you do not see step 8 (which happened in my case) your setup will copy the files and when it restarts mac again you will see , Disk Error.. Pressny key to restart.
To overcome this problem do these steps

A) Boot into OS X, put the XP CD in. Use the Boot Camp Assistant to start the XP install.
B) Once your mac reboots and starts the windows install you will get a blue screen with white text in the upper left hand corner that says "Windows Setup." On the bottom of the screen there will be some info telling you this and that is loading. Keep an eye on this. It will slowly list a bunch of things that it is loading.
C)Toward the end, it will say something like "Starting Windows Setup." At this point, press and hold the F10 button. Keep holding it until you get a black screen with white text.
D) You are now in the Recovery Manager. You will be asked what volume you want. The only choice you should have is 1. This is your new Windows partition, it is not your Mac OS partition. You may safely type "1" (without quotes) and press return. Then, the prompt will look like this:
C:\WINDOWS\
At the prompt, you type "cd\" (without quotes) and press return, the prompt will now look like this:
C:\
E) Now, to format your windows partition. To do so, at the prompt type the following without quotation marks "format c: /fs:FAT32" When typed into the prompt, it will look like this (pay close attention to spacing)
C:\format c: /fs:FAT32
F) It will give you a warning and ask if you are sure. Type "y" and press return.
It will take some time to format and you will see a percentage counter counting up from 1% to 100%. When it is done, you will be back at the C:\ prompt where you will just type "exit" and press return.

9) After doing the above steps, windows setup should proceed normally, which I am not covering

Hooooosh, i think it was pretty long post, but just thought it may help someone like me.

A very good source: How do I install Windows XP on my Mac using Boot Camp? :: Free Tech Support :: Ask Dave Taylor!®
 
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Excellent thread. I am sure it will help the people using Macbooks. As for me, i am not much into computers and Mac is like another planet for me[lol].
 

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