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boot camp (beta)
Merouan
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Hey guys, I just have a simple question. First, the background: Back when intel macs came out and I bought a mac, I installed boot camp, and made a partition for windows that was only 8 gb. I haven't needed more space than that until now, when it turns out a class I'm taking needs software that is 5 gb. From what I can remember, windows itself takes 5 gb, right? So I don't have enough space.
I need to remove my current partition, and create a larger one so that I can install this program. Given that boot camp has expired, and I don't want to buy leopard simply to create a new partition, do you think it is a good idea to just set the time back before the expiration date for boot camp, remove the partition, and create a new one? This question is really aimed at whether this restructuring of my hard disk would cause problems in the future...has anyone had problems doing something like this with boot camp beta? Thanks.
I need to remove my current partition, and create a larger one so that I can install this program. Given that boot camp has expired, and I don't want to buy leopard simply to create a new partition, do you think it is a good idea to just set the time back before the expiration date for boot camp, remove the partition, and create a new one? This question is really aimed at whether this restructuring of my hard disk would cause problems in the future...has anyone had problems doing something like this with boot camp beta? Thanks.
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Ah, but you have the expiration of Boot Camp as a secondary problem. Hmm, maybe you should buy Parallels Desktop for $70, since that's less than an upgrade to Leopard but it can run your Boot Camp partition as a virtual machine, without leaving OSX. I think you can get a trial key to see if this will work.
If you do decide to run the partition as a virtual machine in this manner, Parallels may tell you that you cannot resize or enlarge the virtual machine's disk because it is a Boot Camp partition. In this case you can create a new virtual disk using Parallels, and it will show up as a new drive letter in Windows. You can install your 5GB software to this new drive. Yea it's a hack but it means you don't have to buy Leopard, don't have to risk data loss with partitioning, and don't have to buy the partitioning software. Plus Parallels is really handy, I use it a lot.
Okay, so your solutions lies in diskutil resizeVolume...
... and I just re-read the last bit of your post, saying if it would be okay to set the clock back, remove the partition, and recreate it. Does that actually work? I would say go for it, especially since I don't actually have a machine I'm willing to test the terminal commands on. I think this would be your safest option. Remember that you can backup your windows partition with NetRestore (there's another program that does it too... it's a bit simpler than net restore, but doesn't do as much... the name illudes me at the moment(Found it! It's called Winclone)), and just restore the image once you're done reparitioning
What kind of a performance hit would the virtual machine take, assuming it's on modern hardware? Would just navigating the OS (folders etc) cause lag? Obviously it wouldn't work for like gaming, but how about running word/firefox/etc?
Well, it depends on how much stress you're putting on the machine collectively. One nice thing about modern machines is that with the advent of multi-core processors, you can tell the machine to give a core to the VM. I've used VMs in development, and other than a bit of lag when you throw too much at the machine, there really isn't much difference.
It's more RAM-hungry than anything else. I bought a 2GHz Core Duo MacBook in 2006 (before they went to the Core 2 Duo) with 512MB of RAM and running the Parallels beta was intolerably slow. I upgraded to 2GB in 2007 and suddenly running Windows XP in a VM (giving the VM 512MB RAM) was perfectly fine.