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(3)I have been trying to get Boot Camp to work for me since I got my Mac Pro. Up until just a couple of days ago, I had not been able to succeed. I found the solution to my problem on Apple's discussion forums thank goodness.
However, let me impart my latest attempt and success first and as I do, I'll reveal what I learned to allow myself to get Boot Camp to work.
My latest attempt was started because a dear friend is allowing me to use a version of Windows XP Pro that doesn't require authorization. Is that an Enterprise version?
I first installed the OS under Parallels using the .ISO I was sent. That worked flawlessly and using the latest Parallels makes installing Windows and Vista as easy as using OS X. It's quite impressive. Coherence is just amazing. There is just something very odd about seeing Internet Explorer 7 running side by side with Safari and not seeing the Windows desktop but the Mac OS X desktop.
So I burned the Windows XP Pro .ISO to a CD and downloaded the latest Boot Camp (1.1.2) to make sure I had the latest and greatest. I started the Boot Camp Assistant. I partitioned my second 250GB HD for Windows. Burned the Apple Windows Driver CD and attempted to start the install.
Again and again, I kept getting this message that I needed to wait for the CD to be recognized by the OS before the process can start. Since I'm burning the CD, I thought that maybe the CD wasn't bootable, so I put it in my Windows box and booted the computer. Sure enough, the CD booted just fine. So that isn't the problem.
My next course of action was to go off to Apple's discussion forums. I keep hearing that they are not the best place to get info, but I figure it's better than nothing at this point. I find a couple of threads about my problem, but they were pretty much saying the same thing I was thinking. Later that evening, I had a thought. I wondered if I needed to be logged in as an Administrator in order for this to work. So I logged out of my Standard user account and logged in with my Administrator account and tried again. Low and behold the process of installing Windows XP Pro began. It sure would be nice if the documentation stated this fact.
So installing Windows went without incident. Some have had problems. Maybe all the problems I was having getting the process started allowed me to skip all the installation woes others have had. Anyway, I finished installing Windows, inserted the Drivers CD and installed all those. Then started the way too much fun task of installing the 60 odd patches and approximately 12 suggested updates. Windows really needs a better way to deal with updates. Their way really sucks!
I finally got the OS up and running and I just say it's pretty nice to be running Windows XP Pro on a Quad XEON system with 2GB's of RAM. The OS sees all 4 cores so at least when games start supporting multi-core systems, I'll be ready. I may need to get a better video card thought. World of Warcraft seemed a little slow compared to my OS X version. The OS X version has been updated to support multi-threading OpenGL which really sped up the frame rate on the Mac side.
Using Boot Camp has some big drawbacks thought. I like to listen to iTunes while I play games. Normally I'm playing on my old PC box and the Mac is playing iTunes. If I'm booting to Windows on the Mac Pro, I can't do that. So I have to use my iPod instead. It works, it's not that big of a deal, but I like the freedom.
If I could wish for anything in the new Leopard OS coming out soon, I think I would like to see the ability to switch between OS X and Windows via a simple menu option or keypress. Kind of like how a KVM works. When I'm using OS X, Windows is sleeping in memory somewhere and when I switch to Windows, OS X sleeps in memory. It would really be nice if they didn't sleep but just didn't display, but that would probably take up too much physical memory.
Anyway, Boot Camp is pretty cool, Parallels is cooler. Parallels is even cooler still since it can use the Boot Camp partition as it's virtual HD.
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