BootCamp, XP and second internal HD

[darkfey]

I am having difficulty installing xp on a second drive I have put in my Mac Pro.

I understand that the documentation indicates there should be no issues with installing xp on a second drive, but it also states that "Windows XP requires its own partition on your computer's internal startup disk. Boot Camp Assistant creates a second partition on your startup disk..."

My question is this - do I need to move the second drive into the primary drive slot in the Mac Pro? If so, how do I get the system to recognize that drive as the internal startup disk? Will this affect my drive that has OS X installed on it?

I'm not sure how BootCamp handles these issues, but currently it will not recognize the second drive as a drive onto which it can install XP. I have used BootCamp to create a single windows partition on that drive, and it still does not recognize it.

Any input you could give would be very appreciated.

 

[7on]

You should try and installing it without Bootcamp. Use Bootcamp to burn the driver CD (show contents and burn the .img file in the app), but bootcamp is for XP for single harddrive systems. Bootcamp is simply a partitioning tool. If you boot from an XP disk it should recognise the two drives (make sure you install to the empty drive, or you'll write over your OSX drive).

 

[Chocomonsters]

What is advantage of using MBR for Vista/XP on separate Mac Pro HD versus using GPT/hybrid setup by Boot Camp on separate Mac Pro HD?

Thanks!

 

[MRU]

I'm not sure how BootCamp handles these issues, but currently it will not recognize the second drive as a drive onto which it can install XP. I have used BootCamp to create a single windows partition on that drive, and it still does not recognize it.

Any input you could give would be very appreciated.

I ran into a similar problem when installing Vista on a seperate drive.

My solution was. Simply leave the drive in the second bay, but just pull out the first bay drive a little (no need to remove it completely, just unhook its connector)

Then boot up holding down C on your keyboard.

This will start installing from the CD, and then just install as normal and you will have no problems.

Once XP is installed and bootcamp drivers installed. Simply shut down the comp and push the first bay drive back into its slot.

Now when you boot simple press ALT/COMMAND and select Macintosh HD to start, then once back in OSX, go into system preferences / startupdisk - and just make sure your OS X is the default start up.

Then just use command/alt to select XP on bootup in future.

 

[broogle]

Another approach

I had four identical internal Mac-formatted hard drives, and I could not tell which was which when installing XP. I was reluctant to pull three of the four drives. Here is what finally worked for me.

1) Format the second internal drive using Disk Utility, as a single partition, with Master Disk Partition and FAT32. (For some reason, the Boot Camp Assistant did NOT do this, but left the drive as GUID and Mac OS Extended, which was why I could not find the desired drive.) Give the drive an easily recognized name. Boot Camp Assistant will warn you that you will have to re-format the drive in Windows.
2) Use Boot Camp Assistant to start the Windows installer, and when the drive list is presented, select the drive with the name you gave it (and the MDP partition). Delete the partition, so there is an unpartitioned drive in the list.
3) On the same screen, choose to partition the unpartitioned space. Since my drive was 500GB, I had to do this as NTFS. I chose the default formatting instead of quick format, but I regret the choice - it took two hours! If you try this, choose quick format and if it does not work, go for the long process.
4) Continue with the installation as usual.

Hope this helps!

 

[Maccio]

I Cloned

I solved this problem using Winclone.

I have a MacBook Pro running Windows XP via both BootCamp and Parallels. The XP file system was FAT32, and I am not sure if this approach would work with NTFS.

I decided that since I only had 1GB of free space on my XP system, I would swap out my MBP's Superdrive with a MCE OptiBay (http://mcetech.com/optibay/) and put a second 7200 RPM 250GB hard drive into my MBP. Then I could put XP on the new drive, and change the file system to NTFS, get a lot more space, and not have the OSes fighting for the same drive.

In XP I purchased and installed Paragon's Partition Manager which plays nicely with both Windows and Mac partitions. I would need to move partitions around, and I wanted to have Partition Manager installed before I cloned my XP system so that it would be available in case I had to restart the process and had to delete my new XP partition.

I created a MacOS extended partition and a 32GB FAT32 partition on the new drive, then created a clone image of the XP system with Winclone and stored that in the MacOS partition. Using Winclone I restored the clone image onto the FAT32 partition, so now I had an exact duplicate of the original XP machine. In order to make sure that I could tell which XP system I was booting into, I booted into the first boot drive labeled "Windows" and changed the C:\Temp directory to C:\Temporary temporarily, and figured out which XP BootCamp partition had the Temp directory and which had the Temporary directory.

After making sure that I had booted into the new XP system, I converted the file system to NTFS.

I then resized the partitions using Partition Manager and gave myself a 150GB partition for XP and have a nice 100GB partition for OSX backups. Finally I changed the C:\Temporary directory back to C:\Temp.

I now have two BootCamp partitions to boot into and a clone file of the original XP system, and when I get brave I can smoke the BootCamp partition off of my OSX volume and free up an additional 32GB.