Dual Boot vs. Boot Camp

[RedRaven571]

I have an early 2009 iMac currently running OSX 10.5.8 with Win 7 RTU via boot camp. I now have my Snow Leopard and Windows 7 Home Premium disks and am ready to do a clean install of both OS.

My question is: Can I just partition the HDD and install SN and W7 in a dual boot configuration without using boot camp (similar to a dual boot hackintosh)?

Would there be any benefits? Any downside? Would VMware still detect W7 if not in boot camp?

Any assistance is greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

 

[niZmo]

Yes you can. I believe that by using bootcamp it installs the drivers that you need for W7. But you can always do that afterwards with your snow leopard cd. There is probably more benefits but that's all I know. The current bootcamp isn't officially for W7, but it does work. Apple with be updating bootcamp by the end of the year to work nicely with W7. VMWare does work with W7. I read somewhere that it was being really slow but that could just be that person. If you install both you can just hold down option on boot and choose what OS you want to use. There is a program that does the same thing. It was efi or something like that like that I forgot, that could be way off.

 

[ayeying]

Boot Camp is dual boot. Boot Camp is just a utility to partition the drive.