First off, I would like to start by saying
YES I DID IT, I GOT, MY 10.5 days OF FRUSTRATION HAS FINALLY PAID OFF.
I now definitively triple booted my MacBook Pro with Leopard, XP, and Vista using 0 extra softwares like rEFIt or software of that sort.
For 1 week and 2 weekends, I had nothing but trouble trying to triple boot for the reason of that some of my lovely old software does not work too well in Vista (64 Bit).
Although, I do not have the triple boot of the traditional sort, I am positively and extraordinarily pleased with the progress I have done. You see I first go to the aesthetically pleasing GUI by Apple which allows me to choose either to use Mac or Windows. Once choosing windows, I receive the less appealing but useful and intuitive black-screen-with-white-letters Windows boot screen which allows me to choose between Vista and "earlier version of Windows," or something of that wording. In essence, I have a dual boot of Mac and Window, and a dual boot of Vista and XP.
With every problem known with dual booting and triple booting, probably every problem with booting and even having windows, I have had, including but not limited to: a not true hardware failure (Windows told me I had a Hardware Failure), Hall.idll or something of that nature failure, boot.ini failure, missing files failure, cannot find partition failure, and all the many more problems that can be named.
After my 10.5 days of frustration I had another difficulty.
My next problem was to boot the XP partition with some kind of virtualization software. After much reading, I was able to have parallels choose which Boot camp partition to use by editing the My Boot Camp.pvs file. Vmware does not allow you to do that so easily, and I spent last night trying to figure out what to do. I received the error most people have with a triple boot system. Also, the googling and search in Vmware Fusion forums did not help as I am not all that knowing about computers and the answers given were extremely long and complicated. I mean, take a look, http://communities.vmware.com/message/803666#803666. But now is where some Higher Being, perhaps God, has blessed me with not being able to use the Mac GUI for the triple booting. I deleted the old Boot camp Vmware file under the Application support then is then under virtual machine folder and restarted the Virtual Machine. When booting, I get the Windows Dual booting menu of black-screen-with-white-letters. Now I have windows help Vmware Fusion from not knowing which boot camp partition to use and have which partition to choose up to me.
Problem solved.
Now to my dilemma,
My question is a question of worry, if I install maybe Vmware Fusion tools or maybe parallels, will they at all damage or make problematic my hard work, since I noticed Vmware has drivers that I do not know will conflict with the Boot camp drivers. I liked both parallels and Fusion for virtualization. I have heard horror stories of parallels rearranging the boot camp partition somehow.
Please do tell me, will either tools do harm?
I really do not want to go through my heartache again.
Also which virtualization software do you recommend as I have tried both and like both very much? I know half the features each one claim to have go down the drain as they do not work with a boot camp partition.
YES I DID IT, I GOT, MY 10.5 days OF FRUSTRATION HAS FINALLY PAID OFF.
I now definitively triple booted my MacBook Pro with Leopard, XP, and Vista using 0 extra softwares like rEFIt or software of that sort.
For 1 week and 2 weekends, I had nothing but trouble trying to triple boot for the reason of that some of my lovely old software does not work too well in Vista (64 Bit).
Although, I do not have the triple boot of the traditional sort, I am positively and extraordinarily pleased with the progress I have done. You see I first go to the aesthetically pleasing GUI by Apple which allows me to choose either to use Mac or Windows. Once choosing windows, I receive the less appealing but useful and intuitive black-screen-with-white-letters Windows boot screen which allows me to choose between Vista and "earlier version of Windows," or something of that wording. In essence, I have a dual boot of Mac and Window, and a dual boot of Vista and XP.
With every problem known with dual booting and triple booting, probably every problem with booting and even having windows, I have had, including but not limited to: a not true hardware failure (Windows told me I had a Hardware Failure), Hall.idll or something of that nature failure, boot.ini failure, missing files failure, cannot find partition failure, and all the many more problems that can be named.
After my 10.5 days of frustration I had another difficulty.
My next problem was to boot the XP partition with some kind of virtualization software. After much reading, I was able to have parallels choose which Boot camp partition to use by editing the My Boot Camp.pvs file. Vmware does not allow you to do that so easily, and I spent last night trying to figure out what to do. I received the error most people have with a triple boot system. Also, the googling and search in Vmware Fusion forums did not help as I am not all that knowing about computers and the answers given were extremely long and complicated. I mean, take a look, http://communities.vmware.com/message/803666#803666. But now is where some Higher Being, perhaps God, has blessed me with not being able to use the Mac GUI for the triple booting. I deleted the old Boot camp Vmware file under the Application support then is then under virtual machine folder and restarted the Virtual Machine. When booting, I get the Windows Dual booting menu of black-screen-with-white-letters. Now I have windows help Vmware Fusion from not knowing which boot camp partition to use and have which partition to choose up to me.
Problem solved.
Now to my dilemma,
My question is a question of worry, if I install maybe Vmware Fusion tools or maybe parallels, will they at all damage or make problematic my hard work, since I noticed Vmware has drivers that I do not know will conflict with the Boot camp drivers. I liked both parallels and Fusion for virtualization. I have heard horror stories of parallels rearranging the boot camp partition somehow.
Please do tell me, will either tools do harm?
I really do not want to go through my heartache again.
Also which virtualization software do you recommend as I have tried both and like both very much? I know half the features each one claim to have go down the drain as they do not work with a boot camp partition.
