Mac OSX Bootcamp XP funtime

I got a Mac. I always said I wouldn't. And now I have. A little Mac Mini 2.53Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo 4Gb. Just for research, you understand ;) And cos I fell in love with my iPhone 3GS. Damn it.

What I found out so far:

- Snow Leopard is teh sexeh.
- Objective-C sucks monkey balls.

Anyway, I wanted to set up a little XP installation so I could see how well Windows runs on a Mac, and to do stuff that the mac just won't do, like Visual Studio 2008 (soooo much better than XCode).

I thought I would be smart and use the OSX Disk Utility to partition the drive 3 ways so I could have a main mac partition, a FAT32 partition to share my music on, and a NTFS partition for XP. But all my manual blunderings and attempts with Bootcamp just shagged it up, and ended up with "Disk error" on boot-up. Thank goodness for holding down the Option key on reboot to choose the boot drive. I had to use Disk Utility to create one big contiguous Mac partition again.

In essence then, to get XP running happily:

1. In OSX run Boot Camp Assistant and create a Windows Partition (I chose 32GB)
2. Put the XP disk in the drive when it tells you and start the Windows installation process.
3. When the XP installer asks what partition to put it on, choose your new Bootcamp partition and SELECT NTFS FORMAT. *Not* Quick Format, Fat32 or "Preserve Existing". It must do it the long winded way.

Anyways, it works. I was very impressed by the XP drivers Apple included on the main OSX disc. XP runs fabbo on the Mac Mini, and it picked up my Logitech wireless keyboard/mouse combo without a hitch, even though the box for them says OSX only.

Oh, almost forgot. After installing the Apple XP drivers I could read files off the main OSX drive from XP with no problems (Read Only). I thought that wasn't possible! Well chuffed.

Toodles.