Picture this, I have been figthing with IP on my new Mac Pro for 3 days, nothing will print.

In despair I download bootcamp 1.3 beta from apple and decide to install a yet un-used Vista Home premium DVD on it.

I create the driver DVD per the Boot camp wizard and then a partition for Windows. In order not to risk my Mac boot disk I decide to create a 32GB partition on my 2nd drive (a 150GB raptor). I read through the .pdf and it looks like 32GB is a good choise since it is the max for FAT that appears to be sort of recommended. At least that's how I understand it.

Reboot the mac and insert the Win Vista disk. After entering my license key, I get to the disk selection window. Per the recommendation, I carfully avoid selection the disk 0 partitions containing OSX and click on my 32GB disk 2 partition 3. I am told that the partition is not NTFS which is a pre-req for Vista. No problem, a format function is availalbe and I do re-format in NTFS.

Things start to get nasty after that. The next message tells me that my 32gb partition is too small for Vista... it takes 46GB... (which in itself is beyond belief but anyway...). There is another function to increase the size of the partition, but it is greyd out since the OSX partition occupies the rest of disk... no way to change any other partition either...

I decide to reboot the machine in OSX mode to change the size of the partition, but for some reason, the Option key doesn't work and the machine starts to boot on the Vista DVD once more... I arrive at the same screen when I was before... completely stuck.

There is no way to open physically a drive bay on the Mac Pro, and my windows wireless keyboard is being recognized by the Vista installer, but the CD eject key doesn't work... neat...

Major panic attack, what can I do?

Fortunately another PC connected to the net enabled me to google up a trick to open the drives during the boot of a Mac Pro... just push on the button of a physically connected USB mouse during the boot and the drives will miraculously open... which results in the Mac Pro booting on OSX... safe...

By the way, it seems that the Windows partition has to be on the Macintosh HD for this thing to work.

I am still looking for ways to have Vista recognizing my bluebooth keyboard and mouse, but that is less of a pain somehow...

My god, what an amazing waste of time...

Cheers,
Bernard

For some reason, this reminds me of the time Richard Pryor set himself on fire. His explaination was that he was just sitting there with a glass of milk and some cookies and when he dunked a cookie into the milk, it blew up and that is how he got burned.

The moral of it is: Don't go around mixing things that shouldn't be put together as bad things will happen...like matter and antimatter!!

Funny thing is that when I first read the title of your post, I knew it was you but I figured you were going to tell us about some military nightmare you had!!

Aren't confused with Jonathan?

Cheers,
Bernard

Well, Boot Camp sounds a lot like a military term

Not sure why you had partition size problems...I was able to successfully install Vista Ultimate (32 bit) on a Fat32 partition...after installing Vista, Photoshop CS3, Lightroom and a few other things, I've got 17gigs used and 14 gigs available...this on a Dual Quadcore using Boot camp 1.3. You were using 1.3 right?

Jeff,

Thanks for the answer. Yes, I was using 1.3 downloaded just a few days ago, also on a dual quad core with RAM to spare. OSX level is 10.4.9.

One difference was that I was trying to install Vista Home Premium instead of Ultimate, but I would think that Ultimate needs more space, right?

Could it be that "the problem" came from the fact that the Windows partition I had created was not on Macintosh HD?

I works now, but I did change both the partition location (it is now on Macintosh HD) and its size (80 GB). Not sure which helped in fact.

Having a 80GB partition is in fact not really a problem size wise (Macintosh HD is a 500GB disk), the only concern is that having an NTFS Win partition will make data more difficult to exchange between OSX and Vista I understand...

Regards,
Bernard

Yep... my bad!

As I learned when I went through my own boot camp experience on a Macbook Pro, OS X can read from NTFS partitions, but can't write to them. There are some alpha-quality extensions for OS X that can write to NTFS, but random data corruption is not something anyone needs on a production system. The best way is either to keep files on a network shared folder, or to create an additional FAT32 partition for file interchange - this should be doable in the Disk Utility.

MacFUSE does that. More info here and for the NTFS part, documentation is here. I've not done extensive tests but it looks like it works although, as you said, it's beta software and it's unwise to use it on a production computer.