Boot Camp For Beginers

I have to admit, I’m not a Mac aficionado in any way shape or form. So when I was asked to install Windows 7 on an iMac in a dual boot scenario,  my eyebrows were raised. But, you know what, it was so simple.

OS X has a handy little application installed called Boot Camp. Very Simple to use. First thing to do is make sure your Mac is up to date. This is a little bit tedious and may involve a couple 0f updates but has to be done.

Then launch Boot Camp from the utilities folder and create you partition. Boot Camp provides a GUI slider that lets you select the size of you partition. The size you need depends on what you want to do with your Windows OS. The recommended minimum is at least 5GB. But I’d probably go with a minimum of 15GB at least.

Then click on the “Start the Windows Installer” button and pop your windows disk in, click Start Installation. You can also install XP and Vista. The Mac then boots from the Windows disc and you’re away. When it comes to selecting the partition, you’ll find one called BOOTCAMP. Select that and then format. Follow the instruction all the way.

Once you are logged into you Windows OS you will need to put your OS X disc in. This is to install Boot Camp to your Windows OS so that you can boot back into OS X. This should start up automatically and will install some Mac specific drivers too. Once that’s installed you’ll find an icon for under the hidden icons button. Click on this to restart in OS X. Or, when you reboot hold down the option key to get the option screen. Easy! 

There is an excellent guide on the Apple site: http://www.apple.com/support/bootcamp/

But it doesn’t stop there. If you want to be really slick with it, there’s a little application that you can install that will give you a GUI display at start up. From this you can then select the OS you want to log into. No Option key needed!

The applicatuion is call rEFIt, it’s free and you can down load it here: http://refit.sourceforge.net/doc/c1s1_install.html

Make sure you install this under OS X. You might want to go with the manual install straight off as the automatic one didn’t work for me. But after it’s installed it’s all done automatically, no extra config needed.

You may be asking why? Why would you want to do that? Windows and Mac, together?

Why not?…I think I’ve been converted a little bit.