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Gah and argh! - The road to running Windows on my Macbook

So… After becoming so incidental at playing World of Warcraft that paying the monthly fee really feels like a waste of money Habbie and i decided to see how we would like playing Guildwars together. We already had one account and knew we sort of liked the game, but i missed the social interaction that’s just a lot easier to obtain in WoW, hence trying to play together. Nice idea, tricky implementation it turns out

Up until this weekend we only had one Windows-compatible machine in the house. Sure there’s the server, but we both really want that to continue running linux, so simply putting Windows on that wasn’t an option. H proceeded to try all sorts of interesting setups with wine on his powerbook, or wine on the server with remote X from his powerbook, or just moving the server to his desk and running Guildwars under wine on the server directly. None worked. In the mean time i had been trying Parallels, VMware and wine from DarwinPorts on my Intel-inside Macbook. No success. Sure i got Windows to work in VMware but 3D turned out to be unsupported, and contrary to directions in the software, not possible to turn on regardless of beta-ness. So on we went to our final option: Bootcamp to run Windows on my Macbook natively.

Now being all future-options-accommodating and foreseeing, i had partitioned my Macbook’s harddisk into an ‘Apple’ volume, and a ‘Data’ volume which i could easily free up if i ever wanted to do something with, for example, a second OS. This is where we’re getting to the real ‘Gah and argh!’: Bootcamp won’t work with disks partitioned with anything other than itself! Apple’s suggestion? Reinstall your whole system.

After some digging online we found that we should be able to remove the partition when booted in single user mode from the Mac OS X install DVD (the single user part here may not be necessary if there’s another way to get shell when booted from the install DVD):

1. Boot from the DVD
2. Quit the installer, choose ‘Startup disk’ and instruct it to boot from DVD
3. Reboot, while holding down the ’s’ key for single user mode

Now we could check the current disk layout using gpt show rdisk0. My ‘Data’ volume turned out to be at index 3, so we removed it using gpt remove -i 3 rdisk0. Then, we wanted to grow the Apple volume to the maxsize as detailed in this article, but that failed.

At this point we resorted to fugely tactics: after rebooting normally we tried to get Bootcamp to make a Windows partition from a tiny part of my ‘Apple’ volume. The progress at this point was that, having removed the second partition, Bootcamp actually started. Bootcamp requires at least 10G of free space for even the smallest possible Windows partition, so i did some more data removal. Even though there was enough free space, Bootcamp failed to create the partition, but after some more internet-digging we found that some guy had been successful after having deleted some files, the last of which was the sleepimage located in /var/vm/sleepimage. So i deleted this file first, and sure enough Bootcamp became a whole lot more compliant. After doing the following:

1. Make a Windows partition using Bootcamp
2. Reboot
3. Tell Bootcamp you want to get rid of Windows, and grow the Apple volume to the entire disk
4. Reboot
5. Start Bootcamp to finally get started with creating your actual Windows partition and installing Windows

installing Windows was as easy as promised, and it works like a charm (seeing Windows on a mac is really strange though ). In hindsight the command line growing of the volume might have worked if we had removed that sleepimage, but at that point we didn’t know yet that it could mess things up.

I really felt punished for my usually-a-very-good-idea foresight to partition my harddisk. It’s almost like, beyond not needing ‘clue’ to operate a mac, it’s hitting you right in the face if you happen to possess some