Boot Camp and Parallels
Boot Camp is a set of drivers and stuff that lets you run Windows XP or Vista on a Mac. What you do is partition your main hard drive, that is, split the hard drive in two so that it can function like two distinct hard drives; and install your copy of Windows onto the new partition after you have created it in Mac OS X. Boot Camp ultimately allows you to run both Windows and Mac at different times on the same machine.
(I know I sound like a commercial, but bear with me.) =)
And Parallels is a program that lets you start up Windows within a window while Mac OS X is still running, allowing you to run both operating systems at the same time. However, every time that Parallels runs Windows off of the Boot Camp partition that it's on, it alters some very critical system files, files that, if not returned to their correct state when you close the program Parallels, do not allow you to run Windows all by itself.
Well, that happened me.
What a pain!!!!!!! Fortunately, I had a backup of the Windows Boot Camp partition. So, I dutifully reformatted the Boot Camp partition and then put all of the files back onto it. But doing so caused the partition to be marked as unbootable; ergo, it still could not start up all by itself; problems, problems. Finally, after reformatting and repartitioning too many times and starting up Windows Recovery Console and reinstalling Windows and, and... well, you get the picture, I'm in the last steps (hopefully) to get Windows back and running; I'll post back to tell you whether it ended up working or not. I definitely hope programs and OSes and everything else computer related begin to be more universally cross-compatible. I've had enough of BSOD's (Blue Screen Of Death) and SBOD's (Spinning Beachball Of Death) to last me a long while. One prediction I can make, though, is that with the advent of the Internet, computing is becoming less and less hardware based; so maybe my wishes will become reality in not that many years.
Posted at 07:34PM Nov 15, 2008 by advargas in General | Comments[0]