i got 3x 500GB Drives, how to partition for bootcamp ?

Posted:
in Genius Bar edited January 2014
I bought a new MAC PRO with 3 identical 500GB drives.



How would you configure this ? I had planned for having 1 500GB drive for windows and 1 reserved for time machine but since i will buy a airport with 1TB drive also i will use that for bootcamp.



I need windows for autocad and flight simulator, aldo i also use X-plane ofcorse :-)



But 500GB in windows XP 32 bit ? what with that vista crap ? i need 32 bit because otherwise some things dont work in windows.. pfff i hope i don't end up with loads of partitions on the windows side ? What is the best system ? What would you use the 3rd drive for on os x ? Just space ? in a seperate partition ?



Thanks for your answers...

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 6
    Were you planning on doing a RAID or any sort? 1 more drive and you could have had a nice RAID 10 setup...



    As far as HDD space goes, that doesn't matter 32 vs 64 bit, that's with the ram. Windoze 32 will only see about 3.5 to 4 gigs of ram. Bootcamp is only if you need to create a live partition (example: you have one HDD for both OS X & XP, or you have a RAID setup). All you need to do is pop in a XP/Vista disc and boot from it, select the drive you want, and install. All the Mac drivers are on the 10.5 disc now, you just pop that in after the install/setup is done and run the installer for the drivers.
  • Reply 2 of 6
    Thanks for your message, but how will i be able while booting up without bootcamp if i put windows on 1 hd, to select windows and the other time mac os x ?
  • Reply 3 of 6
    Hold option key at startup. pick the drive you want to boot from... the Mac drive will be what it's named on your desktop, the XP drive will simply say Windows
  • Reply 4 of 6
    OS X & the windows driver install contain a boot utility, it will show up on XP in the system tray next to the clock, you can pick from there as well the boot drive.
  • Reply 5 of 6
    Ok thanks!!! What would you do with my 2x 500gb drives ? Just keep them to store data, or use one for mirror/time machine ?
  • Reply 6 of 6
    If OS X is your main production then you can use a RAID 1. Do you need a whole 500gb for windoze? Otherwise you could use bootcamp and make a partition for XP, then use the 3rd 500gb drive for TM. You could get another drive and put in there... newegg.com sells OEM bare drives (not the refurbs, just ships like it would to apple to assemble). It just really depends on your needs. I have a RAID 1 on parents G5, it works ok, but I still needed an external drive the other day when I did leopard install.. the filesystem was corrupted, but it still boot 10.4, so this would have been the case for a commercial utility to clean that up.



    RAIDs are nice, when a drive dies you just swap in a new one, make sure in the setup it's set for auto rebuild, it repairs itself and off you go. TM, you need the leopard DVD, boot from that, then do a restore from a TM disc.
Sign In or Register to comment.