Some users are more than a little upset that Boot Camp, the program Apple released last week to make booting
Windows XP on Intel Macs, is
rendering their OS X
partitions inoperable. The software is, of course, intended to enable dual-booting between Windows and OS X, but
some users
reporting on Apple's support
forums that after installing Windows they're unable to return to Apple's OS. A few users have discovered partial
solutions, Apple isn't saying much about it yet, except that Boot Camp is beta at-your-own-risk software and as such is
currently unsupported.
Tags: boot camp, BootCamp
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Comments
6
Subscribe to commentsRetro_XApr 13th 2006 4:44PM
Well, it is beta afterall. So you should know that there are risks involved.
shadekhApr 13th 2006 4:57PM
exactly, its beta. The problem is, google has somewhat elevated beta to far above its normal quality standards. beta's are supposed to be buggy. very few actually work well. Take office 2007 for instance, which even in its current beta 1 tr state has some rather major bugs and extremely slow applications with broken compatibility.
We are talking about a rather extremely sensitive program here (though thankfully from apple running on specific hardware...imagine the mess otherwise..) and a large number of users having little to no technical knowledge. its no wonder they encountered bugs.
PeterApr 13th 2006 5:26PM
Yeah it's beta, but you usually think of beta as not feature complete, sporadic crashes and such. Not complete disk and data failure. I don't expect a developer to test every scenario before releasing a beta, but testing to be sure it doesn't render the machine useless seems like a good first test.
tylerApr 13th 2006 5:36PM
The windows install overwrote the MBR on their drives. Probably boots right to Windows and doesn't even give an option. Funny.
FabuloApr 13th 2006 8:04PM
Beta is supposed to be feature complete or at least major features complete). Alpha is not. But in any case, some beta are more dangerous than other. It's pretty obvious that Gmail beta is not as likely as BootCamp beta to erase all your data and put 7 generation curse on your family.
Bootcamp does pretty risky stuff, like flashing your firmware, fidgeting with partitions, writing boot records...
In other news, since computers don't cost as much as cars (any more) you could spend another $400 for a DELL that runs Windows natively and keeps the crud away from your new shiny Macintosh. That's the price of piece of mind. Also, double booting is so windows95.
Wry CooterApr 13th 2006 10:02PM
I have read several comments that it is the windows install routine, that is munging up the Boot Camp stuff. Obviously, this isn't happening with every version of Windows people are installing, but it does look like that is indeed the case that something is up with some. And how many versions of XP are there floating around in the wild?
If you have not been able to reboot into Tiger from Windows, please, if you comment publically, detail your Windows installation itself...XP sp2, whatever. Did you choose a funky method of partitioning? What file format did you use for the disk formatting?
And in case it is also hardware related, state which Mac you were using.
Personally, if I were trying BootCamp, I would rather be able to keep windows on its own separate physical drive.