09.05.06
Soa Pro III: Boot Camp
Since I already dedicated nearly two days to Boot Camp, might as well dedicate a post. Boot Camp is a very impressive utility. It does a very good job making dual booting easy. It will even “Partition Magic” your drives for you. I wanted to use a lot of space for gaming without cutting into my main Mac drive though, so I just threw Windows on one of the 160gb SATA drives I had from my “old” PC. I still put Windows on the main Mac drive though, but in a small 10gb NTFS partition. Then on the other drive I split it into two partitions, a 32gb FAT32 “shared” partition so I can quickly send things back and forth between both OSes and then the rest of the drive is just NTFS, which OS X can read, but not write. So far I am liking that setup. Windows has plenty of room to grow and so does OS X.
Unfortunately, getting to that setup was a painful task that took most of my blessed 3 day weekend. The problem with the Mac Pro and Boot Camp is SATA. Windows doesn’t have the right drivers at install time and even if you update them post install, it still doesn’t work. So your SATA II drives only get about 3-4 mb/s transfer rates instead of the 60-70 mb/s you would expect. Not sure if Apple is working on a fix for this or not since I don’t really see how they could. To fix the problem you have to modify the XP install disc, which I don’t think Boot Camp will ever do. Fortunately (kind of), somebody threw up a guide on how to “slipstream” all your goods onto your XP CD. Although, the reason it tooke me a day and a half was because of the poor instructions.
Instead of listing instructions to fix the Mac Pro SATA issue he decided to give a much larger list of instructions to include his personal preferences on hot-fixes and sketchy hacks from sketchy sites. So what could have been a 1 or 2 item list of instructions was more like 12 and you had to try and customize it to fit your needs. Combine this with my inexperience with slipstreaming and there was a lot of room for error. I didn’t have a Windows box to do this with anymore either, so I needed to use the broken boot camp to make my new XP ISOs. Since SATA is transferring so slowly it takes about an hour to install XP. Then I have to install updates like .Net Framework and all my needed software, nLite, Nero, etc. Once I add a driver or make a change to the ISO then I have to use it to re-install XP and start the entire process over again. So even if it is only 5 or 6 attempts that will destroy an entire day.
I eventually started completely over, trying very hard to stick with the instructions and trim as little excess as possible and was able to get a working install. Beyond the SATA, everything works great. You pop in your driver CD, it runs an installer, and you have audio, video, mac to windows friendly keyboard, etc. And now that I have the slipstreaming done I have made a really amazing XP install disc. nLite really lets you tweak things out. Every little thing that bugged me about XP had tweak options. Like not making Thumbs.db files, going to a Windows 2K appearance, etc. Some of them got pretty nitty gritty too. I also was able to make a fully unattended install. Every question the installer asks you, including the CD Key can be entered into nLite. So I am now using this as my official XP installer for PC and Mac.
So a miserable time, but I came away with something pretty worth while. And now that it is done I can just work away on my Mac Pro without any trouble.