| Oct072009 | Installing Boot Camp |
Liveblogging! I’m going to update this as it happens because it’s a pretty slow day today. I am attempting to install Boot Camp 3.0 on a late 2007, 15″ Macbook Pro.
10:30am – Ok I just finished burning my last DVD-R, backing up my iPhone snapshots, applications, iTunes Library XML and the videos I took while in Japan and Australia.
10:45am – I’m not really sure if all my music is backed up successfully to my Time Machine drive and I can’t check because I’m here at work. Maybe I’ll burn a DVD of the music I don’t want to lose.
11:13am – Threw together about 4.5 GB of music that I might want if I were to ever lose it all. Looking at it now, it might actually be a relief to lose it all and start over from scratch. Once I’ve formatted, I’ll probably only pull over the music that I really couldn’t live without and ditch the old stuff.
11:17am – Now that I think about it, I’m really trusting this “Verify Data” checkbox to do it’s job and actually verify the data. Thankfully, these backups aren’t mission critical but I would be sad to lose them. It would be helpful to write up a “manifest” of sorts in case I do lose it. ls -l > folder.txt should be good enough.
11:47am – Ok manifests created and music DVD has finished burning. This caramel latte is leaving a pretty gross aftertaste in my mouth (as all sweets do). Next steps: Reboot and format drive. Install Snow Leopard. Partition hard drive and install Windows.
11:58am – Restarting now to boot into the Snow Leopard installer. At the last minute, I decided to backup my Firefox profile just in case I wanted it. It’s actually quite nice to format a computer and still keep all the same browser settings.
12:00pm – Erasing hard drive now. I kinda clicked it too quickly without pausing to think but I think I’m ok. (20 seconds later, it’s done!)
12:04pm – Snow Leopard installation begins. I’ve unchecked all the boxes for printers, fonts, languages and X11 and it says it will require 8.01 GB. About 22 minutes remaining.
12:16pm – It’s done. Much faster than reported and now it’s booting into Snow Leopard for the first time and playing a Welcome video.
12:21pm – I finished filling out the wizard asking me all sorts of stuff about my computer. Time to partition. Snow Leopard has used up 8.71 GB out of my 159.7 GB hard disk. Boot Camp Assistant pretends that I can shrink the OS X partition to 13 GB but it encounters some immovable files which forces me to up it to 15 GB.
12:45pm – Argh, I fucked up (not too badly though). I forgot that 1) My Mac cannot boot on 64-bit versions of Windows DVDs and 2) I can install Windows without having to install OS X first. Gotta take a few steps backwards.
2:22pm – Ergh, this is getting on my nerves now. I’ve created a bootable Windows DVD now and I’ve started the install process. I decided to keep OS X on another partition seeing as I might eventually go back anyway.
2:46pm – Booting into Windows for the first time now and completing the installation.
4:00pm – This so called “Completing Installation…” step of the setup continues to crash. I tried again from scratch and it crashed again. This is the worst.
Around 7:00pm that night – I got home and I managed to install it this time. Either the Windows installation DVD was disagreeing with my system or it was overheating or something. This time it finally worked.
Expect a post-mortem soon on what it’s like to run Boot Camp 3.0 on a non-unibody MacBook Pro.
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