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Well if you read that article again, it is talking about having ONLY Windows installed on the Mac hard drive described, so it is not really a question of what the advantage would be over Boot Camp. You would not wind up with any OSX on the disk- just Windows, so the question would become "Why would anyone want to have only Windows on a Macintosh?"
 
The Boot Camp Assistant is just a nice GUI to partition the drive. It does nothing more. It doesn't even burn driver discs anymore.
 
so there is no way of using the disk utilities to partition up the harddisk to have the mac part and a window part, then install windows "direct" onto the window partition and to have OSX on the other?

thought that could be done, or has been done before.
 
so there is no way of using the disk utilities to partition up the harddisk to have the mac part and a window part, then install windows "direct" onto the window partition and to have OSX on the other?

thought that could be done, or has been done before.

You don't need Boot Camp Assistant to install Windows on a Mac. You can use Disk Utility to partition your hard disk, creating one partition for Windows. Then boot your Mac using a Windows CD, it will let you install Windows to the new partition you just created.
 
You don't need Boot Camp Assistant to install Windows on a Mac. You can use Disk Utility to partition your hard disk, creating one partition for Windows. Then boot your Mac using a Windows CD, it will let you install Windows to the new partition you just created.

OK I must be missing something along the way! :confused: What would the advantage being of doing it manually rather than just letting the Boot Camp Assistant do the partitioning for the user?
 
OK I must be missing something along the way! :confused: What would the advantage being of doing it manually rather than just letting the Boot Camp Assistant do the partitioning for the user?
Disk Utility and Boot Camp Assistant both do effectively the same thing. The Boot Camp Assistant just has a much easier to understand GUI.
 
Disk Utility and Boot Camp Assistant both do effectively the same thing. The Boot Camp Assistant just has a much easier to understand GUI.

Quite true and I agree that anyone who has used DU would have no problems doing that- so was just wondering if the OP had some particular reason for wanting to that I could not see, whether it be to override BC's insistence on only two partitions per drive or whatever it might be.
 
Quite true and I agree that anyone who has used DU would have no problems doing that- so was just wondering if the OP had some particular reason for wanting to that I could not see, whether it be to override BC's insistence on only two partitions per drive or whatever it might be.
Sounds like newbie is in awe at bypassing the Boot Camp Assistant or that you can just run Windows only on your Mac if you really wanted to.
 
It's my impression that Boot Camp also installs a boot loader. Without that, there's no choosing between the two OS-es. Also, I thought that Boot Camp installed another partition scheme, one that Windows also recognizes. I thought that out of the box, Macs have a partition scheme that Windows can't understand.

Don't know if all this is true, though. Am I right?
 
just thought if there would be a more efficient way of doing things.
a bit of a control freak, rather than just use the magic tools.
 
I don't use BootCamp but I'm under the impression that it also contains drivers for windows to recognize the Mac architecture. I'm not sure about this but if I'm correct, if you boot to windows, it won't know how to act with Mac gestures and hardware.
 
I don't use BootCamp but I'm under the impression that it also contains drivers for windows to recognize the Mac architecture. I'm not sure about this but if I'm correct, if you boot to windows, it won't know how to act with Mac gestures and hardware.

Not anymore. The Windows drivers are on the Leopard disk itself now. Boot Camp is just a partitioning tool.
 
It's my impression that Boot Camp also installs a boot loader. Without that, there's no choosing between the two OS-es. Also, I thought that Boot Camp installed another partition scheme, one that Windows also recognizes. I thought that out of the box, Macs have a partition scheme that Windows can't understand.

Don't know if all this is true, though. Am I right?

No. The "boot loader" is already on the Intel Mac's firmware. The Mac's firmware provides an emulated BIOS interface for Windows -- allowing it to boot and a 'MBR' interface to the Mac's GPT disk partitioning -- letting Windows use the same hard disk.

The OS chooser is accessed by holding down the Option-key during boot, before the Apple logo shows up.

As stated in previous posts, the Boot Camp Assistant is an easier to use front-end to Disk Utility to help users partition their hard disk.
 
Back in 10.4.6 you had to do an EFI firmware update before you could use Boot Camp. That was the actual firmware update that added the BIOS side support for installing Windows. Boot Camp 1.x then was a live partitioner and driver burning.

Boot Camp 2.0 only partitions the drive and the Leopard DVD has the drivers.
 
You're all missing the point of Bootcamp

Sure, you can use Disk Utility to repartition the drive into two partitions, but you would be detroying the Mac partition already on there. Boot Camp resizes the OS X partition and adds a second partition to the drive. You can't do that under Disk Utility without destroying the existing OS X partition.
 
Sure, you can use Disk Utility to repartition the drive into two partitions, but you would be detroying the Mac partition already on there. Boot Camp resizes the OS X partition and adds a second partition to the drive. You can't do that under Disk Utility without destroying the existing OS X partition.

Actually that is not really the case (if you are using Leopard anyway)- since non-destructive partitioning works fine in Leopard's Disk Utility. I have included a shot of a repartitioning in progress to show that resizing an existing partition (by dragging the bottom right corner up to shrink it) and then adding a new partition by clicking the "+" at the bottom of the screen will not result in any data loss. In the example I shrunk the only partition on the disk ("S750") then clicked the plus sign to add a 2nd partition ("S750_2") and you can see that the box that appears when you click "Apply" notes that "No partitions will be erased."

If you want to repartition non-destructively on a boot drive, then you need to run the Disk Utility on an installer disk to do it, but no data need be lost.

BTW- it works in reverse too- if you highlight the second partition and click "-" it will remove that partition and allow you to enlarge the remaining partition back to the full size of the volume with no data loss on it (and obviously the data on the partition you blow away will be gone). You can add or subtract any number of partitions this way and each can be formatted independently.
 

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im still missing the point...someone care to tell me what it is??? why not just use bootcamp?
 
im still missing the point...someone care to tell me what it is??? why not just use bootcamp?

Boot Camp Assistant can only support two partitions -- one for Mac, one for Windows. If you want more partitions, you have to use Disk Utility to create the partitions.
 
Yes you can achieve this. All you do is insert your xp disk, load the installation like you would with bootcamp, and reformat the drive. Then install.
 
Actually that is not really the case (if you are using Leopard anyway)- since non-destructive partitioning works fine in Leopard's Disk Utility. I have included a shot of a repartitioning in progress to show that resizing an existing partition (by dragging the bottom right corner up to shrink it) and then adding a new partition by clicking the "+" at the bottom of the screen will not result in any data loss. In the example I shrunk the only partition on the disk ("S750") then clicked the plus sign to add a 2nd partition ("S750_2") and you can see that the box that appears when you click "Apply" notes that "No partitions will be erased."

If you want to repartition non-destructively on a boot drive, then you need to run the Disk Utility on an installer disk to do it, but no data need be lost.

BTW- it works in reverse too- if you highlight the second partition and click "-" it will remove that partition and allow you to enlarge the remaining partition back to the full size of the volume with no data loss on it (and obviously the data on the partition you blow away will be gone). You can add or subtract any number of partitions this way and each can be formatted independently.

Will this non-destructive repartitioning work in 10.4 as well?

Shoot, didn't realize the thread was quite old. If anyone has the answer still, that would be great.
 
I have a question about Windows on a Mac but didn't feel it was worthy of it's own thread so I'll ask it here...
Do you need anti virus and stuff like that if your running windows on a Mac?
I never plan on using windows again in my life but I've just always wondered if you needed a AV program like you would running windows on a PC.
Thanks.
 
Do you need anti virus and stuff like that if your running windows on a Mac?
I never plan on using windows again in my life but I've just always wondered if you needed a AV program like you would running windows on a PC.
Thanks.

The easiest way to think of it is like this: When you run Windows with bootcamp on a Mac, for almost all intents and purposes it behaves just like a Windows machine would behave. So if you install some Windows software with a virus, yes it would infect your Mac.
 
The easiest way to think of it is like this: When you run Windows with bootcamp on a Mac, for almost all intents and purposes it behaves just like a Windows machine would behave. So if you install some Windows software with a virus, yes it would infect your Mac.

Thats what I figured but wasnt sure.. Thanks
 
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