Weekend partitioning 16 November, 2010

This past weekend I decided to dual boot myMacBook Pro. I had had a dual booted configuration on my old Mac Book, the one when I first made the jump to a mac 4 +years ago, but quickly went to the single configuration and never looked back. I was nervous about abruptly switching to a Mac in the middle of the semester because I wasn't sure about switching IDEs or coding in terminal on the mac-- I needed a safety net and the dual boot was the best option. I also had a desktop back then and anything that was strictly Windows could be done on that. Jump to know and I've been using Visual Studio 2010 at work and needed to work on some stuff at home, i.e. brush up ALOT!

So I went for it, vaguely remembering it was an easy process, but quickly remembered that the only reason it was an easy process the first time around was I working in close proximity to people like @theandym.

Sadly I don't get to exploit the resources of CCIT anymore, which made this weekend project a little challenging, but brute force prevailed. Man I wish I had the image of the dual booted machine and could just throw that on.

Some things I learned while putting windows on my Mac:
Windows Discs
1) I had an old CD of a Window that was a copy that kept throwing errors. The Drive didn't like it so I had to copy it in Toast and re-burn it.
2) When my original CD didn't work @elaforc provided me with an .iso of Windows XP SP3, but I found that simply mounting the image and copying it through Toast threw errors. I was able to get it to complete when I simple burned the image to a disk, but the version didn't match up with my Serial so I had to return to the orignal disk and troubleshoot
3) I was almost to the point of using a bootable USB stick because who keeps blank CDs around?

Bootcamp
1) Bootcamp should recognize when Windows asks for a restart so I don't have to worry about forgeting to hold the option key down
3) Bootcamp is a little finicky and likes to work with an unpartitioned drive.

Partions
 I created a 5 gig swap drive which let me place all my install .exes so I didn't have to download a lot of programs and updates before I put Windows on the web.

Parallels
I didn't get to use this the first time around, but wish I had. Wow. I remember the drudgery of switching back and forth between my OSs, but Parallels solves that fairly easily with two option of either running a VM or running the two OSs in Coherence, which basically puts them in one window. I'm still spend most of my time on OSX, but it's nice to open a VM window when I need to run Visual Studio or something that is only on XP. I might start using it to run NotePad++

Two weeks later I am very happy with the setup. So I might start posting more coding things on this blog, which feels like a sham because I am way out of the loop, but trying to play catch up.