I'm planning on getting a MBP soon in which im going to optibay with a 120gb ssd for a boot drive. If I were to dual boot with windows, would I be able to partition both drives and have the windows and mac home folders on the HDD, and them both boot from the SSD? Would boot camp assistant support that? If not, how would I go about doing that?
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Dual Booting With Optibay
- Thread starter jakerockshard
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Let me get this straight. You plan on using an HDD for your files and replacing the optical bay with an SSD and keep the OS files on the SSD.
NOT possible with the current options.
However if the iMac line is to be taken as an example you CAN boot from one drive(SSSD) and store your stuff on another drive(HDD). This is how Apple ships the iMac if you add an SSD.
But for a MBP you are limited to only one drive an SSD or HDD.
NOT possible with the current options.
However if the iMac line is to be taken as an example you CAN boot from one drive(SSSD) and store your stuff on another drive(HDD). This is how Apple ships the iMac if you add an SSD.
But for a MBP you are limited to only one drive an SSD or HDD.
I understand what you're trying to do (I have an SSD in the optical drive spot too, using an OptiBay) but it's not super easy.
You want to have the drives setup thusly:
-SSD
--Partition1 (OS X)
--Partition2 (Win7)
-HDD
--Partition1 (OS X home directory)
--Partition2 (Windows home directory)
This is not something that Boot Camp Assistant will just "do for you". What you'll need to do is setup install OS X on the SSD with just one partition, then run boot camp assistant to repartition the drive and install Windows. Once both operating systems are up and stable, then partition the HDD and setup each OS to store their home directories on the respective HDD partitions.
You could potentially do this with a singly-partitioned HDD, but I would not recommend this route. OS X likes HFS+ and Windows 7 likes NTFS.
If you have a ton of files, you're probably going to need a 3rd external hard drive to temporarily store your stuff while you format the HDD.
Search the forums or macosxhints.com for ways to move your OS X home directory to another spot, it's not that difficult, but you must be painstaking about preserving your data.
As for Windows, you're on your own, but someone has surely done it and search will be your friend. On Windows XP, TweakUI could take care of this, but I would find a better solution, personally.
You want to have the drives setup thusly:
-SSD
--Partition1 (OS X)
--Partition2 (Win7)
-HDD
--Partition1 (OS X home directory)
--Partition2 (Windows home directory)
This is not something that Boot Camp Assistant will just "do for you". What you'll need to do is setup install OS X on the SSD with just one partition, then run boot camp assistant to repartition the drive and install Windows. Once both operating systems are up and stable, then partition the HDD and setup each OS to store their home directories on the respective HDD partitions.
You could potentially do this with a singly-partitioned HDD, but I would not recommend this route. OS X likes HFS+ and Windows 7 likes NTFS.
If you have a ton of files, you're probably going to need a 3rd external hard drive to temporarily store your stuff while you format the HDD.
Search the forums or macosxhints.com for ways to move your OS X home directory to another spot, it's not that difficult, but you must be painstaking about preserving your data.
As for Windows, you're on your own, but someone has surely done it and search will be your friend. On Windows XP, TweakUI could take care of this, but I would find a better solution, personally.