It has been a battle, but I finally got my Macbook Pro configured as a dual boot machine. While it doesn't seem *right* to put Windows on an Apple, it has some advantages, not the least of which is being able to check cross browser compatibility for Drupal sites we develop at work. You need a LEGAL copy of Windows. Please don't steal software.

Given what a chore it was for met to get this to work right, I thought I would document the experience. Perhaps others can avoid some of the pitfalls I fell into.

EVENING 1

Step 1, backup your Mac. I recently upgraded to Leopard, so I used Time Machine--which truly rocks.

Step 2, update your firmware.

Updating my firmware was a huge issue. I needed to go to v 1.3 and all it would do would start the process, let out a looooong beep and then bootup without doing anything. I ended up checking my disk permissions. It appeared the permissions needed repairing, so I went through that process. I tried updating the firmware again. No joy. Finally I managed to get it to work by removing all firmware updates from my laptop, then repairing permissions again, and finally zapping the pram (restart while holding command, option, p and r). I downloaded the firmware update manually and it finally took.

Step 3, partition your drive using Bootcamp.

I encountered significant difficulties here as well. You are supposed to use the Bootcamp utility /applications/utilities/ to create a special partition for your Mac that will hold your Windows install. I selected a 32 gig partition--but when bootcamp tried to create the partition the software indicated that I needed to repair my disk permissions yet again.

EVENING 2

I decided to repair my disk permissions from the Leopard install disk. After repairing the permissions (which took for ever) I booted back into Leopard, and began the process of partitioning again. It seemed to be working great until halfway through the partitioning process when Bootcamp failed with a message that indicated some files couldn't be moved and that I should reformat the disk and try again.

AFTERNOON and EVENING 3

I got a fresh backup from my laptop. I popped the Leopard disk in and started a fresh install of Leopard. That took about an hour and half. After it was done, it prompted me as to whether I would like to grab my files from Time Machine. That took another hour or so to move the files over. Finally I got around to setting up my partition. This time it worked perfectly.

Step 4, format your partition.

The Bootcamp instructions indicate that you can use FAT (as long as your partition is 32 gig or smaller) or NTFS. FAT is supposed to allow you to read AND write from OSX to the partition. NTFS is supposed to be more stable and secure. I initially chose FAT because I wanted to make use of the space whether I was in Windows or not.

Step 5, install Windows.

I'm not going to go over the instructions here. They exist HERE and are pretty straight forward. However, after I tried installing Windows several times and ended in a disk error each time, I reformatted my partition as NTFS. FAT proved to be problematic. Finally! I have a stable Windows install. Needless to say, the first thing I did was to download Clam Win virus protection and then began the tedious task of downloading all of the required security updates.

The next steps will be to setup WAMP, setup SVN, and create a sandbox of the sites we are developing.