I want just win7 on my iMac, no bootcamp, no osx partition, can it be done?

[euphuistical]

Don't ask me why or anything like that, it will just lead to a nasty discussion. Right now on my iMac I have two equally sized partitions, one for OS X and one for win7. Ideally I could just reformat the rest of the HDD into NTFS and I'd be pretty much set.

Though my reasons are simple, I got both my macs (27in i7 iMac, and before that a 15in MBP). I wasn't heavy in to gaming at that time, and had been out of it for awhile so the idea of a mac was appealing. Now though I spend pretty much all my free time gaming, and even ones with mac ports (SC2, wow, TF2) are inferior in a number of ways. But my MBP will continue to proudly run OSX. It is a great operating system, just no what I want on my desktop at the moment.

Only problem is I don't know what bootcamp does exactly. Will I risk driver problems like my bluetooth or wifi suddenly not working?

Oh, and on a related note, when I restart my computer it just boots directly in to windows, holding down the cmd key does nothing. I haven't investigated any further because I really didn't want it to sart up in OS X to begin with.


So please help. Can I just delete the mac part then reinstall, do a total reformat and just install from my win7 boot DVD? Or if I need bootcamp just reinstall or shrink the OSX partition to as small as I can and dedicate the rest to win7?


Please you gurus, guide me!

Thanks

 

[flopticalcube]

I would shrink the OSX partition. You may get firmware update in the future which can only be done through OSX. Remove all unnecessary programs, strip the languages, etc and shrink the partition. You can make the whole disk w7, I have done that myself in the past, but like I said it may pose problems down the road. Btw, it's the option key you hold down on boot, not the command key. Set your default drive in System Prefs on OSX or Bootcamp tray item in W7.

 

[euphuistical]

I just resized the OSX partition using Disk Utilty and now my windows partition has seemed to disappear. I am trying to use the windows boot CD to see if I can recover it, and I had a back up of my win partition made a few days ago, but anyone have any advice? I put the mac partition down to about 120gb.

Now when I restart and hold option only the mac partition shows, the boot camp assistant doesnt show any windows partition, and when I put the disk in it attempts a fresh install.

I used the win7 boot disk to try and repair but it seems to need drivers from the mac OS cd, and I have no idea how to eject a CD from the windows install menu on a 27in imac. Any idea how that is done? Thanks

 

[Winni]

Don't ask me why or anything like that, it will just lead to a nasty discussion. Right now on my iMac I have two equally sized partitions, one for OS X and one for win7. Ideally I could just reformat the rest of the HDD into NTFS and I'd be pretty much set.

Though my reasons are simple, I got both my macs (27in i7 iMac, and before that a 15in MBP). I wasn't heavy in to gaming at that time, and had been out of it for awhile so the idea of a mac was appealing. Now though I spend pretty much all my free time gaming, and even ones with mac ports (SC2, wow, TF2) are inferior in a number of ways. But my MBP will continue to proudly run OSX. It is a great operating system, just no what I want on my desktop at the moment.

Only problem is I don't know what bootcamp does exactly. Will I risk driver problems like my bluetooth or wifi suddenly not working?

Oh, and on a related note, when I restart my computer it just boots directly in to windows, holding down the cmd key does nothing. I haven't investigated any further because I really didn't want it to sart up in OS X to begin with.


So please help. Can I just delete the mac part then reinstall, do a total reformat and just install from my win7 boot DVD? Or if I need bootcamp just reinstall or shrink the OSX partition to as small as I can and dedicate the rest to win7?


Please you gurus, guide me!

Thanks

Of course you can have Windows as the only operating system on your Apple hardware. And no, you won't be needing the OS X part of Boot Camp for that. However, Windows might have problems with the GUID partition type and you probably have to change the partition type to MBR first.

If the Windows installation DVD for some reason cannot re-partition your hard disk, boot the OS X installation DVD, launch Disk Utility and let it create ONE MBR partition. Then boot the Windows DVD - it should now be able to use the hard disk (you might have to delete the partitions again before it works).

You won't have a problem with drivers for your Mac -- the Windows side of "Boot Camp" actually is nothing more than a collection of hardware drivers.

One thing you should keep in mind, though: Apple releases firmware updates only in form of installers for OS X. So your kissing those updates goodbye when you're exclusively using Windows (or Linux or FreeBSD or, or, or) on your Mac instead of OS X. Are those firmware updates important? If your system works properly: No, not really.

I've had a couple of OS X-free machines in the past, iMacs and Mac Pros. There never was a real problem with that. (Except for maybe trying to install 64-Bit Windows versions on Intel Macs with a 32-Bit EFI; that required some additional tweaks, but it was nevertheless doable.)