installing vista ultimate via bootcamp?

[schmintan]

are there any issues when installing viata ultimate via bootcamp.
I wanted to have 3 partitions, one for macos, one for vista and one fat32 partition for universal storage, but i feel this might be a bit difficult so i think il do a 50 50 partition. is it really that difficult to do have a universal storage partition for both os'es to use? are there any special tips i may need when installing?

 

[slicedbread]

There is no problem installing Vista (32bit) in Bootcamp.

What you have highlighted are 2 issues, partitioning (one drive i presume) and installing Vista.

Installing Vista 32bit is fine, just follow the instructions in the BC installer. I specifically state 32bit Vista, because thats the only one that is supported by Apple in BC at the moment - there are no drivers for 64bit Vista (or XP) provided by apple at this time. But when it comes to installing, once it reboots from Mac OS then the install will just look like any regular Vista install on a PC.

When it comes to partitioning, the BC installer provides an easy method of partitioning a Mac formatted (HFS+) drive into two, one for your Mac OS and another for Windows. If the windows partition is formatted as Fat32, Mac OS will be able to write to it, but there will be a 32GB limit (as well as the other Fat32 limits such as 2GB max file size etc.); using NTFS negates these issues, but Mac OS can normally only read NTFS and can't write to it.

The BC installer won't let you partition a drive into 3 partitions - you will need to do a bit more leg work and play around with disk utility if you wanna set up a single drive with 3 partitions for HFS/NTFS/Fat32. If you stick to a two partition method its easier to setup (straight from BC installer) and easy to revert back to a single HFS+ partition if you ever wanna get rid of BC

 

[schmintan]

Thanks Guy! thats exactly what i needed to know. il just stick with the two partitions and use an external drive to transferr files between the OS's.

 

[slicedbread]

there is a program called macdrive which will let you read hfs partitions inside windows, so even if you can't write to your windows partition from inside Mac OS, you can read your Mac partition inside windows and copy files over that way. Version 6 I believe supported up to win XP, and there is a version 7 beta that supports Vista now.

There are other ways in which you can force OS X to be able to write to NTFS (google it), but most are experimental and unsupported. I know for a fact that macdrive works (i have tried the demos), but it costs money.