problems with BootCamp on Macbook

[TooLateForAName]

I'm looking to stick win7 alongside snow leopard on a unibody macbook but I'm failing at the first hurdle, the disk is 320gb but bootcamp only seems to be seeing 200GB - it offers me a 5gb windows partition and 194gb mac.

I've tried booting from an external drive and running diskapp repair on the drive - says all fine.

Anyone seen this before? Is there an easy fix? I can create another full size partition in disk app, so it isnt a limitation of firmware or anything.


As an aside can I get win 7 64 bit to run on this machine? (core 2 duo, but according to apple will not run mac os 64 bit - something about the firmware version, but I'm not convinced)

[Strangely Brown]

TooLateForAName said:

I'm looking to stick win7 alongside snow leopard on a unibody macbook but I'm failing at the first hurdle, the disk is 320gb but bootcamp only seems to be seeing 200GB - it offers me a 5gb windows partition and 194gb mac.

I've tried booting from an external drive and running diskapp repair on the drive - says all fine.

Anyone seen this before? Is there an easy fix? I can create another full size partition in disk app, so it isnt a limitation of firmware or anything.

Do you need direct access to the hardware? i.e. Do you really NEED to run Windows under Bootcamp?

Firstly, Win7 is not officially supported under Bootcamp and secondly, you'd probably be better off running it under VMware or Parallels anyway. It all depends on what you want to do with Win7.

TooLateForAName said:

As an aside can I get win 7 64 bit to run on this machine? (core 2 duo, but according to apple will not run mac os 64 bit - something about the firmware version, but I'm not convinced)

There is not much point in running Win7 64bit because you won't be able to use the Bootcamp drivers for the Apple hardware. e.g. You won't be able to use the keyboard driver, so you will never get the correct keymap. IMO, it's better to stick with the 32bit version. Is there something specific that you really need 64bit for?

[TooLateForAName]

Well I wanted to slap some games on :blush: Only reason for having windows isn't it?

So I thought direct access would be better than vmware or similar. The 64 bit was just a thought - I've read that there is a possibility of a firmware update to bring 64 bit to older 64 bit machines.

I thought win7 was officially supported now? I've seen info about it on the apple site. But to be honest, at teh moment I'd be happy to get xp on it....

[Strangely Brown]

TooLateForAName said:

Well I wanted to slap some games on :blush: Only reason for having windows isn't it?

So I thought direct access would be better than vmware or similar.

Unless you have some specific Windows only software, yes. If you want games, you really are going to have to go Bootcamp. You'll probably not get the performance for games from virtualisation.

TooLateForAName said:

The 64 bit was just a thought - I've read that there is a possibility of a firmware update to bring 64 bit to older 64 bit machines.

AIUI, if your machine is Core 2 Duo then it is 64bit. It is the earlier Core Duo machines that are 32bit. This is processor architecture, not firmware.

TooLateForAName said:

I thought win7 was officially supported now? I've seen info about it on the apple site.

Not yet. Apple KB Article

TooLateForAName said:

But to be honest, at teh moment I'd be happy to get xp on it....

If that will run your games, then go for that.

Edited by Strangely Brown on Monday 18th January 18:00

[TooLateForAName]

Strangely Brown said:

TooLateForAName said:

The 64 bit was just a thought - I've read that there is a possibility of a firmware update to bring 64 bit to older 64 bit machines.

AIUI, if your machine is Core 2 Duo then it is 64bit. It is the earlier Core Duo machines that are 32bit. This is processor architecture, not firmware.

Apparently it is a firmware issue for apple. Although the machine is c2d it isnt supported for 64bit snow leopard. It has the 32bit EFI rather than 64bit EFI, plenty of reports of people getting vista64 and win7x64 running on machines with 32bit EFI though. Bloody stupid of apple to produce 64bit machines and them limit them to 32bit imho.

Anyway, I'm not going to get anywhere unless I can sort out being able to use more than 200gb of my disk.


edit - actually problem partly solved, despite claiming it was only going to create a 32gb partition it has managed 140gb. Who wrote this rubbish?

Edited by TooLateForAName on Monday 18th January 18:32

[va1o]

I think they delibretely cripple it to make people feel they have to use OS X. The inability to 'tap to click' is a big annoyance for me.

[Strangely Brown]

Strangely Brown said:

TooLateForAName said:

I thought win7 was officially supported now? I've seen info about it on the apple site.

Not yet. Apple KB Article

It's supported now. New version of Boot Camp just released. 64bit version too.

[va1o]

Strangely Brown said:

It's supported now. New version of Boot Camp just released. 64bit version too.

Thanks for that, just looked it up and your right it was released in the last 24hrs. Well pleased as my MacBook was the only system I have left running Vista, rest of them had been upgraded to 7.