[mudtoe]

Hi folks:

I'm a windows person whose thinking about getting a Mac Book Pro. If I go ahead I'm intending to port my XP Pro installation from my laptop to the Mac Book Pro using Boot Camp, as I understand that by doing that I could boot it either natively or under VMWare Fusion. However, my XP installation has three NFTS partitions, one for the OS, one for the applications, and one for the data files (I always do this with my Windows installations so that the OS partition doesn't constantly grow). Since there are fewer than four partitions, they are all setup as primary partitions. I wanted to find out if I can port this configuration as is to Boot Camp. If I can't then I'd have to go through a lot of pain to get the windows installation to work under Boot Camp because all the installed applications are expecting their files to be on a drive other than "C". I know I could run VMWare Converter and convert the whole thing as is to a virtual disk, but if I did that I wouldn't have the option to boot XP natively. At this point I'm not sure if I'd need that or not (I don't play direct3d games on this laptop), but all other things being equal I would like to have the flexibility to boot XP natively if I needed to.

Also, as a side note, does anyone know if all the XP activation issues have been addressed in the situation where a single XP installation is being booted under what appears to XP to be two different hardware configurations?

mudtoe

[ghporter]

Boot Camp will only work to start with if your startup disk is a single partition. And it will only produce a second partition for Windows.

I have been a Windows person since version 1 (honestly, since 1985!), and I got to the same habit you have with multiple partitions. However, that will not work with Boot Camp. I had to sort of let go and trust my hard drive. This was not as hard as i thought it might be, because I (very easily) became a Mac person primarily, and I use Windows for very little anymore.

I don't know if those activation issues have actually been smoothed out completely. I've never had any issues, but my installation is from a campus-level agreement disc, and it apparently doesn't care.

[ibook_steve]

If you really want to do this, try making the extra partitions as Mac OS X (HFS+) partitions and use MacDrive from Mediafour to access the Mac partitions when in Boot Camp. When in VMWare, the partitions can be set up as shared folders or mapped drives to do the same thing.

Steve

[mudtoe]

Originally Posted by ghporter 

Boot Camp will only work to start with if your startup disk is a single partition. And it will only produce a second partition for Windows.

Can I make the second partition an extended partition, so that as far as the MBR is concerned there are only two partitions (the windows O/S and the extended partition), and then subdivide the extended partition into two logical partitions? That would give me the three that I need, and XP doesn't really care what type the partitions are, other than the boot partition needing to be a primary partition with active status.

mudtoe

[mudtoe]

Originally Posted by ibook_steve 

If you really want to do this, try making the extra partitions as Mac OS X (HFS+) partitions and use MacDrive from Mediafour to access the Mac partitions when in Boot Camp. When in VMWare, the partitions can be set up as shared folders or mapped drives to do the same thing.

Steve

I just looked up MacDrive, and that looks like a useful program. However, under VMWare I think I would have to have direct access to the partitions, as I don't believe network shares are setup in Windows until a user logs on, and I suspect that the timing of the network shares being established versus the other programs being run at logon would likely cause problems. I've run into this issue in the past when someone unwisely has installed software on a network share that is supposed to run at logon.

I know that VMWare for Windows allows you to give direct access to a guest O/S for a whole partition as long as the guest O/S is the only one accessing the partition while it's running. Do you know if VMWare Fusion allows this as well? If so, then I can access the partitions via MacDrive in both scenarios as long as there aren't any issues with MacDrive getting confused about the location of the partitions because Windows is sometimes running from the Boot Camp partition, and sometimes running as a guest VM (although even running as guest it's still running from the Boot Camp partition). I'm not familiar enough with the GPT partition structure yet to know about all the gotchas.

mudtoe