Dual Booting Windows 7!

11:18 May 23rd, 2009 | Notes

I’ve been meaning to dual boot the Windows 7 RC for a while now, but never got around to it for one reason or another. So this morning I decided I finally would.

Let me tell you, it takes a whole freaking day.

I went into this foolishly thinking that it would take a hour, two hours at max. Boy was I wrong. I began by clearing out my Mac of all the crap I’ve acumulated over the years to get me 50GB of space. I planned to devote just 20GB to 7, because I won’t need that much space. With the space cleared out, I ran Boot Camp Assistant a clicked partition.

“Partitioning Failed”

Crap. I eventaully learned that my drive was too fragmented to create 20GB of continuous space. Here’s where I jumped to conclusions: the Mac doesn’t have defragmentation software built in, therefore the Mac doesn’t get fragmented/it defragments on the fly.

WRONG!

What!? My drive is more fragmented than the chinese government!? NO! How do I fix it?!

Searching around the internet I found a few programs that claimed to defragment my hard drive… for $20. Since I don’t have a card that works on the internet, that idea went out the toilet. So I did the only logical thing, reinstall OS X. It took hours to get my Mac back to it’s original state. Wiping the drive, installing Leopard, partioning the hard drive, migrating my Time Machine backup, installing over a gigabyte of patches. THEN, I installed Windows 7.

The amount of driver problems I had was fairly minimal. The only big problem I had was getting the right driver for my graphics card. Windows Update got it right, then the Boot Camp Assistant installed another driver over the top of it and broke it! System Restore, Unintall Driver, Install Updated Driver.

OK done!

Finally, after about 10 hours I have Windows 7 installed on my Mac. Despite all the pain of going through all of this crap, some more good stuff came out of it. I have a partition I can install anything to, I have Windows 7 installed (duh) and it has speeded up my OS X install by quite a bit!

In the end, all I really have to show for it is that I have a pre-release version of Windows on my Mac.

I feel unclean…