Mac Attack: Man bites MacBook Pro OS X Leopard

This is my first post from Safari in OS X (10.5.4) “Leopard”.  

Sure, I thought there was a good reason to get a Mac laptop, but if you are an old Microsoft hound, there is a steep learning curve.  Things just do not work the same on the Mac.

I have had several problems, but they are mainly dealing with my use of Windows on the Mac.  You can dual-boot.  That is, boot into either Windows XP Pro or into OS X.  However, Since I do not normally reboot more than every other week or so, because I normally just hibernate or use “Stand By” when I am in XP, this does not give me much occasion to use the Mac OS, and this was not acceptable because I wanted to be able to also use and learn the Mac OS and its applications.  

So I started using Parallels.  I have 3 days left on my “free trial” before I have to actually make the purchase. 

The real issue though is that I would like to actually use 4 operating systems on this machine.  I just got the Windows 7 64-bit release a couple of days ago.  However, the Mac only allows so many partitions and I am having to do a lot of online studying to try to figure out how to be able to run Windows 7 and Linux, while still running XP Pro and OS X.  

I have heard that Windows 7 has an XP mode where you can run Windows XP inside a virtual machine that is built into Windows 7.  In that event, it might be that I need to uninstall my XP Pro and install W7 instead and then re-install XP Pro inside of the Windows 7 virtual machine.  I could theoretically then launch OX S, launch Parallels Windows 7, and then launch XP Pro (if I needed it). It might be that Windows 7 will satisfy me and I won’t need to run XP Pro inside of it, but I’ve heard some applications will not run in Windows 7.

Then there’s the issue of running Linux.  I know several years ago Linux required 4 separate partitions.  I am not sure how the Ubuntu 9.04 64-bit version I have will run, or what file system it will use.  I have already installed Ubuntu but it is now unresponsive and Parallels tells me “This virtual machine is not available”. 

Last night after installing Partition Magic 8.0 inside the XP Pro virtual machine and then shutting down XP Pro and then rebooting into XP Pro the Mac blue screened on me and immediately rebooted again.  I tried safe mode, but it would not work either.  I then launched OX S and tried to open XP Pro as a virtual machine and it was a no-go also.  

So, fortunately, I had my XP Pro CD with me and I booted from it and was able to repair my XP Pro installation via the recovery console, I think using “chkdsk \r”.  It took a couple of hours to run and did have to re-write some things, but XP worked like a champ after that in both dual boot mode and in the Parallels Virtual Machine.

However, now Ubuntu Linux will not run, and I think that is a consequence of my installing Partition Magic 8.0 and then having to fix my XP Pro installation using the recovery console.  

I did launch Ubuntu once after installing it, as a virtual machine.  I have no idea where it is installed as I only have two partitions on this Mac hard drive, the HFS+ (native Mac file system, which I had actually never heard of before buying this Mac, showing you how Maclueless I was.  The HFS+ is a 100 GB partition.  The other partition is NTFS (200 GB), which I created using Apple’s “Boot Camp” application, allowing dual booting.

However, after installing XP Pro I found out that OS X could not read files on the NTFS partition.  I was feeling pretty stupid at this point for ever buying a Mac.  I have recently installed MacFUSE, which is a backwards engineered NTFS file read/write open source app (because Microsoft would not release the up-front code for NFTS).  So, now I can read my NTFS partition from OS X without XP Pro even running.  

I also installed NTFS-3G which is a driver that works with virtually all types of file systems, and MacFUSE comes with NTFS-3G, even though I had previously installed MacFUSE. 

Last night I tried to open a movie.avi in OS X and it gave me 3 choices of how to run the file, Windows Media Player, Real Player, or Power DVD, all installed on XP Pro.  I selected Real Player and this launched XP as a virtual machine and started Real Player and the movie started automatically.  I was a bit impressed with that, but I was hoping to watch the movie in OS X.  So, that’s something I’ll have to figure out later, how to run DivX and AVI and MPEG files in OS X.  QuickTime Player does not seem to support these formats, but maybe I just need some plugins for it.

Boot Camp cannot handle triple booting without some modifications, so I am still contemplating some options, but I am considering my options now.  It may be that I will simply install some OSes on an external drive and see if that works.  However, from what I am reading on the ‘net now, it seems I have to install Linux before installing Windows and I also have to uninstall XP Pro before installing Windows 7.

Also, it seems I cannot use Partition Magic 8 to do any of this, but that I will need to install rEFIt and iPartition as well

Hopefully, at this end of this arduous path I will have found some degree of enlightenment and become a better and more useful person, but right now, the road is still very steep and rough.  

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 27th, 2009 at 12:23 am and is filed under Computers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.