Now for the average ubergeek, dual-booting is just like breathing and chances are, if you are bothering to read this you have dual-booted something (coffee-machine perhaps, everyone knows they prefer to run Net-BSD). Aaaanyway, my tale has a bit more flair, and without further ado I will recount my frustration.
When I first acquired my MacbookPro I thought I would be clever and set it up to triple boot OS X, Windows XP, and Ubuntu using these comprehensive guides 1 2 (I’ll leave teh explanation of why, for another post). This process went well and the OSes were installed and would boot. Windows was peachy but Ubuntu was being beligerent and the trackpad and a few other miscellaneous hardware items weren’t working too well. As a result Ubuntu was only booted a handful of times.
This was how my hard drive lived until about a month ago when the official Windows 7 beta arrrived. I formatted the Ubuntu partition and replaced it with Windows 7 (blasphemy, I know!). I was fairly impressed with Windows 7 (as impressed as one can be about a Windows product playing catchup with modern OSes). Problems materialised when I wanted to boot into XP. It kept complaining of hardware issues and missing files, BUT would boot perfectly fine in VMWare. This wouldn’t do because I use netstumbler to do wireless site surveys and that requires booting into XP, a VM doesn’t cut it.
I thought a bit about what I would do and settled on trying to re-install XP. Well, long story short I borked both Windows installs. Just to make things complicated for myself I thought I would build an nLite XP install disk. Let’s just say that after about 6 hours and at least 5 attempted installs and partition deletion, creation and formatting I was getting somewhat irate at the whole shebang but forged on nonetheless. I pulled out a normal XP SP3 install disk totally removed both partitions and recreated them into one larger partition. The install eventually took (with the proper install disk) and things were a source of joy….or so I thought … I know, you’d think I was dropped on my head as an infant.
When I tried to load my bootcamp partition in VMWare Fusion it complained of hard drive changes and the like. This is normal. I followed the instructions on the web and restarted VMWare and it re-created the virtual disk and started to boot … YAY! … EPIC WIN! … right … right … wrong. After a few seconds watching the little blue catterpillar crawl across the screen it crashed back to a blue screen with a STOP error 0x0000007b … DAMMIT!
After much searching and reading I found this particular solution on the VMWare community website. Mere hours ago I acted on this advice and it worked an absolute treat.
So there you go, hopefully I can prevent the frustration that I went through to get this all happening. Now I shall head of and take an image of my drive, given my lack of luck with hard drives lately :)
