Boot Camp And XP
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I don’t have the opportunity (read money) to get myself an Intel Mac. Luckily, Chuck, one of my readers, emailed me about his experience with Boot Camp. I thought it was a great tip. For obvious reasons I did not test this, but these tips might possibly save you lot of money and some headaches.
I am sure that I am not the first person to discover this, but I don’t see much on the discussion sites about the fact that you do NOT need the full version of XP to install XP in Boot Camp. I plugged in an external CD player into my new iMac and inserted a full version of Windows 98 prior to starting to install Boot Camp. When I installed Boot Camp, I used a Windows XP upgrade CD, which I purchased for $99. The installation was very smooth and it never questions anything. It found my copy of Windows 98 in the external CD player and never asked me to do anything - it was very simple and saved me $200 over the full version price of XP.
One small unrelated suggestion to those who want be able to write files to their Windows hard drive partition on their Mac - size your Windows partition to be no larger than 32 Gig. You will have to format your partition to the FAT filing system if you want to read and write files to that partition. Unfortunately, during the Boot Camp installation process, you will discover this several steps AFTER you have sized your partition. You will have two options on formatting your windows partition - FAT or NTFS. You will be able to read and write files ONLY in the FAT format. Under the FAT format, the largest partition size is 32 Gig. I had sized my partition to 35 Gig and a step or two later discovered I had to go back and start over to reduce the size to 32 Gig. Hopefully you will save yourself some time by this suggestion.
Thanks, Chuck! Good stuff!
Tags: xp, ntfs, fat, boot camp, external cd, full version xp
One Comment
Paul Marshall
February 23rd, 2008
at 10:24pm
Hello All,
Well I have had a horrible time running XP through boot camp on my MAC. The major problems being the fact that sometimes the screen doesn’t turn off and that I can’t find my MAC files within XP. With the screen problem, It just sits there running, getting very hot until it runs out of power. I have been waiting for one of the updates to fix this problem but nothing has so far. I think that the programmers have done a great job because, all in all, things seem to run well but this is one problem that is driving me nuts. I have a feeling that it is an application in XP that is causing the problem and not a MAC problem but it has gotten to the point now where after spending months getting all the application and there updates in place and running well, I am looking at formatting that partion and starting again.