Boot Camp Beta – First Impressions… Almost

Of course, I had just completed the installation of OnMac.net’s hack to get Windows XP Pro running on a Mac mini Core Duo (on display in our Retail Store) when Apple announced Boot Camp earlier this morning.

All that work for nothing! Yay! Actually, I’m very glad they’ve done this. It means the drivers are already there, it can resize the partition on your hard drive on-the-fly, and it’ll be a more polished solution. In fact, according to reports on the OnMac.net wiki it’ll even boot the installation created with the OnMac.net hack (although it won’t repartition your hard drive and you’ll have to install Apple’s drivers separately).

The thing that concerns me most about this is the fact that Boot Camp can readjust the size of your partition. There’s serious potential for data-loss there.

Unfortunately, after doing the software updates and installing Boot Camp on our Mac mini Core Duo, I discovered that the Mac mini was refusing to allow me to update its firmware. Boot Camp, of course, will not continue without the firmware update.

So close, yet so far…