Installing Vista Ultimate on my Mac

blueser

Apologies in advance to the mods if this has been asked before. Had a quick scan through the first few pages and couldn't see any mention. Anyway, here goes;
I'm looking to install Vista Ultimate on my iMac. Now I've gone through boot camp assistant and attempted to partition my hard drive to accomodate the installation. However, the partition is failing, and I'm getting the following onscreen message;



Now, when I go into Disk Utility and and select the MacIntosh HD, the format comes up as ''Mac OS Extended (journaled)''. Isn't that what BCA is asking me to do? Any help here would be gratefully received. In idiot-proof layterm's terms please!

Sad Professor

It's generally recommended that you create a Bootcamp partition on a freshly formatted drive or else there is the risk of the above error. I think it may just be a fragmentation issue. Removing files over a certain size sometimes fixes it, but not for me when I encountered this error last year. Formatting the disk will result in all your data being erased, so as the notice indicates, you would need to have a backup to restore from.

blueser

Sad Professor wrote: »

It's generally recommended that you create a Bootcamp partition on a freshly formatted drive or else there is the risk of the above error. I think it may just be a fragmentation issue. Removing files over a certain size sometimes fixes it, but not for me when I encountered this error last year. Formatting the disk will result in all your data being erased, so as the notice indicates, you would need to have a backup to restore from.

Right. I'm currently running Time Machine and backing up the MacIntosh HD to an external Drive. This could take a while (418 GB!) so, as Arnie said, I'll be back!

opinion guy

blueser wrote: »

I'm looking to install Vista Ultimate on my iMac.

For the love of God why ?? Win NT fine. Win 7 fine....but vista ??!!?!?!?

blueser

opinion guy wrote: »

For the love of God why ?? Win NT fine. Win 7 fine....but vista ??!!?!?!?

Yeah; I know! But I got my hands on a cheap (free!) copy of Ultimate.

Liameter

Maybe you are about to find out why it was free.

blueser

Liameter wrote: »

Maybe you are about to find out why it was free.

blueser

Well; I eventually got the hard drive partitioned. Now to run Vista, I realise the partition needs to be formatted as NTFS. However, the only (non-Apple) options available in Disk Utility are MS-DOS (FAT), ExFat and Free Space. Are any of these formats compatible with/suitable for Vista?

Sad Professor

NTFS is no good. OS X won't be able to write to it. ExFAT is probably the best option. Not sure it works with Vista though, in which case you'll have to go with FAT32. However, Bootcamp probably already formatted it for you.

MACHEAD

@ blueser. Seriously, unless you have 'must use' apps that require windows, I'd think very carefully before going down that road. 'Vista' was only very marginally more stable than the infamous 'ME' version of windows. Thank goodness we never had it in work (went straight from '98 to 'XP'). But colleagues who had it complained continuously about it.

blueser

MACHEAD wrote: »

@ blueser. Seriously, unless you have 'must use' apps that require windows, I'd think very carefully before going down that road. 'Vista' was only very marginally more stable than the infamous 'ME' version of windows. Thank goodness we never had it in work (went straight from '98 to 'XP'). But colleagues who had it complained continuously about it.

Haven't actually installed it yet MH. Going on some of the comments on here, I might hold off on it for the time being. Cheers for the advice.