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reinstall osX without touching/erasing windows partition?

speakerwizard

speakerwizard

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Aug 8, 2006
1,655
0
London
so, i gotta reinstall osX cause something is wrong, i think installed wrong at factory or something is up cause its buggy and ive tried EVERYTHING, anyway, if i reinstall OSX, it shouldnt interfeir with my windows partition should it? i assume i should reinstall bootcamp for the boot loader afterwards. anyone tried this?
 
I think it's simple enough to do an erase and install just on the partition you select, and I don't think it will affect the boot loader.

Wait for someone else to confirm it, though. I'd hate to be the one resposible for ruining your Windows partition... well, on second thought, I don't care about your Windows partition, but do it for your own sake. :)
 
With Bootcamp, it's a virtual partition you set up, which is not like the actual partitions you set when using Disk Utility - I'd be very careful, as I'd imagine they behave quite differently. I'm not 100% sure though.

Hopefully someone can can give a definitive answer.
 
There's some stuff on it here:

Users can't currently create additional partitions, or change partition sizes after it has been set. The only option Boot Camp allows is to restore the disk back to one single Mac partition. It does this by deleting the Windows partition and expanding the Mac partition to the full size of the drive.

This expansion preserves the contents of the Mac disk, but there is always some risk involved in changing live partitions, so anyone using Boot Camp should heed its warnings to back up any important data before using it to reconfigure a drive.
Click to expand...
 
Just to reiterate - I have completely formatted the Mac partition and reinstalled OS X, and it didn't affect the Windows partition.
 
elppa said:
There's some stuff on it here:
Click to expand...
Interesting but doesn't seem very relevant for the situation here. The original poster is not looking to reconfigure the partitions on the drive, but to reinstall OS X on an already existing partition.
 
elppa said:
With Bootcamp, it's a virtual partition you set up, which is not like the actual partitions you set when using Disk Utility - I'd be very careful, as I'd imagine they behave quite differently. I'm not 100% sure though.

Hopefully someone can can give a definitive answer.
Click to expand...

Not even close. It's a real partition. Not a "virtual" partition... you might be thinking Parallels which uses an image file on the OS X drive. But you can't create 'virtual' partitions with bootcamp.. whatever a virtual partition is.
 
thanks dunc85, ill back the whole lot up 1st though just to be safe and ill let ya all know how i get on, if ya care lol
 
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