Friday, October 24, 2008

Mac and PC can live together

So, after my recent success with getting Kalyway 10.5.1 up and running on my Dell, and then successfully getting dual booting to work, I decided to take Mac and my relationship to the next level. I could by now easily boot from Mac to Vista without a problem, and both OS's worked just fine.
I decided that it was time to upgrade to boot camp, parallels, or vmware fusion.
First, I decided to compare the 3. I had a spare desktop computer lying around that also happens to be a hackintosh, so I took said programs for a spin.

Boot camp:
Basically... it just didnt cut it. It was basically the same setup that I already had, and required a reboot to switch operating systems. I prefer the chameleon bootloader, with a regular vista and mac install.

Parallel desktop vs vmware:
Both are very nice applications and have similar features to each other. Both include desktop integration that I thought was rather nice (vmware had unity, parallels had convergence). I prefer unity over convergence because it integrated the application into mac osx, instead of just adding a taskbar to the bottom of the screen. It treated each application from windows separately and nicely, instead of just basically giving it its own separate location.
Another thing I loved about vmware was the 12 month free McAfee virus protection. I just recently ran out of my anti virus subscription (Ok, I didnt run out... I just kinda deleted Live OneCare because it was so bad) and so I needed protection from the vast expanse that is "the internet".
Anyway... after looking over the products I decided to go with vmware. I backed up my mac to time machine on my 500GB External HDD and copied my windows files over to the remaining space. Then I hopped onto vmwares help page looking for a quick start guide. Low and behold I found one.
Day One (Friday):
So, I began to follow the guide until about 1:12 into the video. I only selected my vista partition and moved on. Then I was presented with a message box that the guy in the video did not receive. It warned me that I could successfully copy this parition to a virtual disk, but I wont be able to boot because my partition was not active. This was because of my chameleon bootloader being installed on my mac partition and thus making partition 2 active. I quickly loaded up diskpart and made my first partition active. I grabbed a soda while I waited for my computer to reboot, and to my surprise it was rather quick...
Regardless, I loaded up vmware converter again and repeated the process and this time I got no error messages when I selected only my vista install partition. I should also mention that I resized the virtual disk to 60GB on that page (in case that effects me later).
As I proceeded through the video I got to the part that he says takes 1 minute per GB. I decided to leave it to do its thing and go to sleep.

Day two (Saturday):
I woke up, grabbed my breakfast, and got to work. VMware converter was finished, and now the video told me to boot into my mac. Sadly, my mac was on the current hard drive, and was only 40 GB large, so I decided to format my entire HDD so that I could use all 150GB. I ran the Kalyway 10.5.1 DVD like in my previous post. This time instead however, I clicked on options when partitioning my HDD and I chose GUID. On the customize page this time I left everything as it was and clicked install.
The installation took about 20 minutes and I was hoping that the install would succeed (the last time I tried to use GUID on a mbr HDD and so it didnt work).
Well... it was almost predictable. GUID did not work, so I booted kalyway dvd again and used MBR instead.
After the install I was presented with a black screen that said that darwin had failed to boot my volume or something like that... I figured it just had trouble changing to MBR from GUID so I rebooted and it loaded fine.
It asked me if I wanted to import data so I choose to import from my time machine backup.
Time Machine finished importing and everything loaded and worked just as it did before I formatted.
I installed vmware on my mac and it installed perfectly, the User interface was really cool.
Then I copied the Virtual Machine files to my mac from my External HDD. I opened up Fusion and followed the instructions to add my vista installation. The first time I booted vista after the installation it was extremely slow, so I added another virtual core and more RAM.

Day 3 (Sunday):
Worked on fusion for a few hours, but I was very busy today. My installation was very buggy and corrupt even when booting normally, and now it is quite messed up. I've decided to copy all my files to my mac and then reinstall windows. I will install Vista, XP, 2000, 98, and Ubuntu and I will detail all of my experiences in more posts.
Days 4, 5, and 6 will be in a new post.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

. it's cause I'm not there to give it the magic touch! Lolz


- D