First, the background: a month or two ago, my MacBook’s hard drive had a minor liquid trauma and had to be replaced. I sent it to Apple to see if they’d replace it, but - as expected - it was accidental damage, not their fault, and so I had to pay $700 to replace the bottom casing, SATA cable, and hard drive (not an option right then, or now), or else have it sent back to me. I opted for the latter, and my MacBook returned to me… working?! Turns out someone in the know (as in, who can take it apart without completely FUBARing the laptop) needed to let it air out, apparently. I ran my MacBook for the next week straight… no difficulties. It seemed perfectly fine.
However, I was still a little leery… and had been itching to give myself more free hard drive space anyhow. I bought my laptop directly from a retail Apple Store, so I had no opportunity to go above and beyond the stock 80 GB hard drive that comes on the MacBook (well, the non-black ones, anyway). So, some research and a few purchases later, I followed these instructions (which have one small caveat, which I will mention after the jump) and replaced my hard drive with little to no difficulty (other than having to go out to Home Depot to buy a Torx T9 screwdriver), ending up with 150 GB internal hard drive and an 80 GB hard drive that could theoretically be used for backup.
The difficulty, however, arose when I tried to use Boot Camp to install a Windows partition.
When I attempted to run the Boot Camp Assistant, I got a warning saying that Boot Camp could not restore or resize partitions (or, apparently, run at all) because my hard drive was already partitioned. This is a bogus error message. The problem, in fact, is that my hard drive was not partitioned correctly, and Boot Camp’s solution was to back everything up and blow it all away using the OS X install disc.
Here’s what’s really going on behind the scenes. Without going into too much detail, on the new Intel Macs, Apple’s OS X installer creates the OS X partition and a few other system partitions - specifically, a 200.0 MB EFI partition, a small reserved area (128.0 MB on my system) which makes the Mac OS X partition bootable (as far as I can tell, anyway), and then the Mac partition itself. In addition, the system partition map uses a GPT partition scheme - not the old Apple partition map. This is where the instructions referenced above had screwed me over unexpectedly.
The second step mentions “Once inside the enclosure, all you need to do is launch the OSX Disk Utility to Erase (format in the pc world) the new drive.” It’s all well and good, but you need to go one step further and have Disk Utility use a GUID partition scheme instead of the Apple partition map. This is available from the Partition tab in Disk Utility - click ‘Options’ to bring it up. You’re given the options of the Apple partition map, GUID partition scheme, a FAT32 partition table, and one other which escapes me at at the time. Use GUID. (It may be called GPT.) Here’s where it gets tricky: you can then use SuperDuper to clone your hard drive contents, as mentioned in the instructions, but I have no idea how you’re going to clone that 200 MB EFI partition - it’s not visible to Mac OS X, and Disk Utility can’t create an EFI system partition.
WARNING: If you follow my experiences and hose your whole hard drive, don’t blame me. Hell, I barely knew what I was doing myself.
I ended up using Coriolis Systems’ iPartition. While predictably named, iPartition does a lot of the stuff that Partition Magic users are used to under Windows - only with a better interface. Go figure. iPartition, as it turns out, is capable of making an EFI system partition, so I shoehorned a 200.0 MB EFI system partition into my partition scheme, told iPartition to write MBR Boot Record data (that’s redundant, now that I think about it… Master boot record boot record?), and rebooted.
Bingo. It turns out that what Boot Camp is looking for is the EFI system partition, the GUID hard drive partition scheme, and no additional partitions of any kind on the hard drive. As soon as I had those in place, Boot Camp Assistant ran like a charm - letting me burn the 1.3b drivers and repartition my system hard drive, so I could commit blasphemy: running Windows Vista Ultimate alongside Mac OS X.
Honestly, with the 1.3b Boot Camp drivers in place, Vista is not a bad OS - for now. I haven’t used it that much yet. We’ll see. I did notice, however, that Apple is now using their Windows version of Apple Software Update to distribute updated versions of the Apple Drivers, and that’s handy. I’d been hoping they’d do that.
So, that’s my adventure. After spending most of a night assuming I was going to hose my hard drive at any time (thank goodness I had backed up before starting this whole shebang), I ended up getting a second OS onto my hard drive, and still having more free space available to Mac OS X than I did when I first bought the MacBook. Life is good.