I am giving my son my 2008 Mac Pro as soon as Apple releases the new Mac Pros. I told him he can have it by the end of June because if there are no Mac Pros I will buy a 12 core 2010. He has been bugging me constantly to install Window on one of the 4 internal drives now. What I want to know is if we use bootcamp am I at risk getting a virus, and if his Windows drive crashes does that effect my Mac drive in bay 1 the reason I am concerned is I do 3d modeling for a living, and all my programs and file reside on that drive.
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Running Windows on 2008 Mac Pro
- Thread starter tony3d
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Any malware on your Windows partition cannot affect your Mac partition, unless you deliberately enable that kind of access, which you are extremely unlikely to do. No Windows malware can run on or affect Mac OS X.
Not entirely true, if he installs apple's (crappy, unstable) HFS drivers, which are included in boot camp, then sure, a windows problem could effect his OSX partition/drive's files.
A virus could also overwrite/wipe the partition table/partitions on the OSX drive without Apple's drivers.
A virus could include HFS drivers itself (I'm not aware of any virus in the wild that does, but it's certainly possible)
Of these the first is the most likely, and definitely should be a concern, the others significantly less so. I'm not trying to fear monger, but assuming absolute security just because the OSes are on different physical platters is a false premise.
Maybe? But not likely?
If you install anti virus in Windows, you should be pretty safe. But it seems like the easiest option is just to wait until it's your sons machine, and then let him risk screwing it up. If your work is that critical, it's just best to wait.
If you install anti virus in Windows, you should be pretty safe. But it seems like the easiest option is just to wait until it's your sons machine, and then let him risk screwing it up. If your work is that critical, it's just best to wait.
My point being that installing bootcamp drivers using the setup program will install that access automatically, and there *is* malware out there that hits boot sector or partition information, which won't have required you to enable access at all.
The second isnt very likely to be encountered but it does exist, and the first is absolutely something to be aware - and neither requires you to have necessarily consciously enabled access
Yep. This.
It's unlikely you'll catch any of these, but it's best just to wait if you're using the machine for real work and don't want to risk it yet.
Some Windows viruses affect all drives connected to the system, no matter what they're formatted as.
Also remember Mac boot sectors are GPT now, which is a standard, not a proprietary Apple thing. Newer versions of Windows are adopting it as well.
Windows apps, including malware, cannot write to an HFS+ formatted drive, unless you give it that ability by installing MacDrive. Name one example otherwise.
They don't need to understand HFS to wipe a drive.
Also, the Bootcamp drivers install HFS drivers these days by default without asking the user. No MacDrive required. So, out of the box, Windows can write to a Mac drive once the Boot Camp drivers are installed.
I've been running Windows 7 and Lion on a 2010 MP. Both are on separate drives. The start drive in Preferences is set to the Mac Lion drive. The boot drive in Windows Bootcamp is also set for the Mac drive so it normally books to Mac.
I haven't had any problems. If only one of the OS drives is in the machine it boots to that one. Should I want to use the MP for Windows only I can just remove the Mac drives and install more Windows drives. Either system seems to work without effecting the other one yet I can copy files into either system from the other one. Very happy with it.
If a real Windows 8 beta shows up I'll probably torture myself with yet another boot drive.
I haven't had any problems. If only one of the OS drives is in the machine it boots to that one. Should I want to use the MP for Windows only I can just remove the Mac drives and install more Windows drives. Either system seems to work without effecting the other one yet I can copy files into either system from the other one. Very happy with it.
If a real Windows 8 beta shows up I'll probably torture myself with yet another boot drive.
Well, at least *one* person gets my point
Usually I disagree with you , but this time we're on the same page
Well, at least *one* person gets my point
Usually I disagree with you , but this time we're on the same page
Get the point. Not worth worrying about.