Bootcamp and Me

Having finally got a legitimate copy of XP (yes legitimate), and further lessened my chances of going to hell by combining that with a legit copy of Office 2003, I decided to give Bootcamp a go, for any number of reasons, not least so that I can compare it to Parallels Desktop.

I’ve been wrestling with it for a while now, cos I get a bit like that when there’s playing to be done with computers, and I knew I would cave in soon. Parallels is great, but I just wanted to see for myself the wonder of Bootcamp.

I am my own worst enemy.

There maybe (will be) trouble ahead

Installing Bootcamp was easy enough. Double clicking on it led to a nice message telling me that in actual fact I couldn’t use Bootcamp because I had already partitioned my drive using Apple’s very own Disk Utility.

A bit more research, and I found that I could actually get away with this if I booted up off my install cd and did some messing in terminal. I say this like the idea was mine, but I nicked it from this article on non-destructively resizing volumes. I actually tried this first, but it didn’t work, so I instead just formatted the scratch partition as FAT-32 and then rebooted and double clicked on Bootcamp.

This time I got the option to burn a Mac driver CD which I duly did, and then clicked the start installation and hours of pain button.

Partition problems

The Windows XP cd buzzed and whirred and eventually I got the screen to choose which partition I wanted to install to. All good? No.

Because, it turns out that for some reason my usually 2gig scratch partition had turned out to be a less than useless 635 meg partition. Oh joy. The Windows installer politely tells me to F off as there is no way that this less than cd sized partition is going to cut it.

The thing I had wanted to avoid the most, i.e. backing up and then wiping my machine just to try a bit of Beta software, was irritatingly almost upon me. Almost.

For some reason I decided to make the disk one through Bootcamp, which it duly did. Except it wouldn’t then let me create a partition for Bootcamp again. So now I had no scratch disk and no Bootcamp.

At this point I am getting mildly vexed, but like the berk I am, I carried on. I booted up from my install disk and tried the resizing trick. Still not having it. I then tried to delete all the free space. After the hour or so it told me it would take, I came back to find it was telling me it would be 23452 hours until it finished (that’s an estimate, but it was a five figure number). Not good, so I skip ignore the ‘you may have just fucked up your disk you idiot’ warning, and tried it again.

This time I came back early, and saw that it was trying to erase free space on two partitions. It got about nine tenths of the way across, finished off, and then started to create another temp file, and start again as the estimated time balloned up to 20k plus hours.

So this meant that despite returning the disk to one partition under Bootcamp, the fact it was originally partitioned by Disk Utility was still in some way visible and meant that it hadn’t really put the disk back to two partitions at all.

I booted via my install disk again, and went into terminal to try to see what it gave me as info for the disk. I was kind of hoping it would still be two partitions, but it gave me one. Bottom line, I’d fucked up. I could put it off no longer. Reinstall here we come.

Su-pa-per Duper, beams are gonna blind me…

And I will feel blue…

Despite having my gear nicked and having to revert back to Lozworld circa February 2006, which was my last back up, I still hadn’t got round to backing up, despite having the Macbook Pro for nearly six weeks.

As I’ve been hearing a lot about Super Duper I decided to give it a try. I’ve been a firm CarbonCopyCloner man since it arrived a few years ago, and it’s my magic pricepoint – free.

Anyway, I fired up Super Duper and did a backup to my network PC, a sparse image. It took nearly four hours, but I feel a lot better knowing that I have finally done a backup.

So, I then copied this back to my Firewire drive and was ready to return my disk to one proper partition that even Bootcamp couldn’t turn it’s nose up at.

Once again, I booted of the install cd, erased the disk, zeroed out data just to be sure, and then prepared to reinstall from my backup, via the restore pane.

Oh dear Mac god why have you forsaken me?

And here I hit another problem. After several restarts to check the web for info, I discover that the restore pain of the version of Disk Utility on Intel Mac install disks is faulty and drag and drop doesnt work. Brilliant. How the hell do I restore now? Thank god for terminal version of Apple System Restore.

A few attempts to get the syntax working, via Disk Utility to mount the backup image, and I am away. Another hour later and I have installed Windows via Bootcamp, and also installed Office.

And now for something so stupid it hurts

So, I had a working mac, and a working Bootcamp. All is well in Lozworld surely? Sadly not, as since the restore of my Super Duper backup, the ‘etc’, ‘tmp’ and ‘var’ sym-links at the root level of my hard drive are now visible. Being the perfectionist that I am, this is like someone constantly scratching a blackboard with their fingernails in my vacinity.

To remedy what I feel will be an easy fix, I load up PathFinder, tick the invisible check box, and then have a look. No dice – it’s not letting me do it.

And this is where I do the stoopidist thing I’ve done since I copied my current mail preferences over my backup in the great chrismas rebuild. Actually scratch that, it’s possibly the stupidest thing I have ever done with a Mac that I can remember.

Have you ever done something daft, like say opening a particularly stubborn plastic packet with the sharpest knife you have whilst resting the packet on your knee, only for the accessive brute force you are applying (with both hands now) to force the packet out from under your knee and the knife through it? One of those things that you know fine well is going to end in tears, but like some sort of out of body experience you do it anyway? That’s what I did.

“I know, I’ll delete the sym-links. OS X is intellingent – it’ll probably recreate them on reboot.”

Dear oh dear.

Upon reboot, my mac went into a DOS like screen (except of course it was the unix shell), with just a prompt. My arse went five pence fifty pence as I pondered the errors of my ways. Hours of sweat and tears only to mess it up at the end. This was not a particular high point for me, Mac wise.

I could do regular terminal commands, and to compound my stupidness the first one I tried was exit. WHY WHY WHY? Terminal duly exited, no prompt, black screen. Lovely.

A reboot and the fastest inserting of a boot cd known to man, saw me back in what was now a familiar environment – the Install cd version of Disk Utility. A quick repair and something flashed up about /etc/ symlink, so I thought this is got to be good.

So, quit the installer, reboot the system, and I get the Tiger welcome video. Okay, at least it’s working. I fill in all the boxes, and then when the define user screen appears, I know deep down what I am going to have to do here.

I create a random user anyway, and start up OS X. I can see my normal user folder and thank the lord it hasn’t deleted it. I take this as a good sign. I then open the users preference pain, and see that only the user I have just set up is present. Not a good sign.

By now, it’s been a full eight hours of messing around, and I am at my wits end, so I don’t even try to dig my way out of this already very large and very deep hole I have found myself in. Straight in with the install CD, wipe the disk, restore the backup and then install Bootcamp again.

Total time taken to install Bootcamp, including backing up the current system, approximately 13 hours. Twenty four minutes my arse.

The obligatory American sitcom moral

And now for the bit where Carlton tells Will why they should have done x instead of y.

There are obvious morals to this story – chief amonst them, don’t be an idiot (this is a re-occuring theme it seems). Less obvious are the others, which I will state in no particular order:

• Don’t delete anything ever – even if you think it’s save its not. They’ve invented Terabyte hard drives for a reason you know.
• Don’t even think of installing Windows on your mac. By doing so you are crossing a boundary. Socially it will be like you had sex with a member of your own family. ‘Look there’s the guy who installed windows on his mac. The deviant’.
• Don’t be a smart arse. Just once in your life read the instructions. It’s better that way.

And here endeth the sermon.

Tune in in the next few months when the illegally obtained Mac OS X 10.5 developer preview melts my network and causes an explosion that destroys enough rainforest to cover three hundred city blocks.