The Mac Chronicles
Winclone
Installing XP under Boot Camp is the Way of the Many Reboots; it takes just short of forever to get all the patches installed, even when starting from an SP2 base. Not something you want to have to do twice, but none of the usual backup utilities will backup or restore a Boot Camp partition.
Fortunately, there’s Winclone, a free utility to address this problem.
So far as I’ve been able to determine, Winclone is the only way to easily and reliably backup and restore a Boot Camp partition; I’m surprised that it’s not getting more press.
Winclone handles both XP and Vista partitions.
Virtualization
Boot Camp is nice in that it allows native access to the hardware; DirectX games will therefore run on it. In fact, at present it’s really the only way to run anything requiring access to the 3D video hardware.
However, it’s somewhat inconvenient in that the system has to be rebooted into it. Most applications don’t use 3D hardware at all, and it’s painful to have to reboot the system in order to use Visual Studio.
Fortunately, there are virtualization products available to address this need. The two most obvious commercial offerings available at present are Parallels and VMware Fusion. Parallels has been available for some time, while VMware Fusion is still in beta, albeit a publicly available beta.
Key to both offerings is the ability to coexist with Boot Camp; we’d otherwise need to install Windows again on the virtual disk image drives that these products use. That would present a licensing problem; furthermore, once through the Way of the Many Reboots was quite enough, thank you.
VMware Fusion offers Boot Camp support as of beta 3. Unfortunately, there are still a few bugs being worked out, among them the inability of Fusion to correctly identify a Boot Camp drive in some instances on Mac Pro systems. This issue did occur on my system, thus knocking Fusion out of the running for me. Fusion does otherwise appear to be quite a compelling product; it’ll be interesting to see what the final version looks like.
Parallels handled the Boot Camp partition without complaint. XP appears in a window on the OS X desktop, with full keyboard and mouse support; move the mouse into the XP window, and it’s the Windows mouse, move it out and it’s the OS X mouse. Slick. Fullscreen view is available; there’s also a ‘Coherence’ mode where the Windows desktop vanishes and the application windows appear in OS X itself. For my part, I prefer the XP in a window mode, but I’ve got a large display.
Downside to the Boot Camp coexistence mode is that the VM can’t be suspended; instead, it has to be shut down in the normal manner. We take the good with the bad, and it’s not such a big deal, really. The vendors of both products have promised 3D hardware virtualization in future releases, which would enable us to get rid of Boot Camp altogether. That’ll be a neat trick if they can pull it off.
Parallels provided a 15-day unlimited test drive, which was more than enough time to make a decision. Cost to license was $79.99 USD; the online purchasing experience was quick and easy, with the activation key delivered immediately.
Well worth the expense, in my opinion.
Boot Camp
Being not quite ready to cut the cord yet, installation of Boot Camp and XP was the next step. The Boot Camp Assistant prepared the drive destined for XP and burned a CD containing Windows hardware drivers.
I then prepared a slipstreamed XPSP2 installation CD using nLite. Installation of XP went very smoothly. I did have to coax device manager into using the sound driver, but didn’t encounter any other issues.
Several hours, innumerable software update applications and about 26 reboots later, Microsoft Update was finally convinced that the service was up to date. All my normal productivity applications ran properly.
Next step was to try something a bit more difficult; Battlefield 2, at 1600×1200 with all the video options set on high. Nearly unplayable, but only in the sense that there was no lag at all; I was leading my targets too much. Glassy smooth. Like butter.
Well, the marketing was correct; this thing runs Windows natively at warp speed.
Next stop, virtualization.