pythonusr Posted June 18, 2007 Share Posted June 18, 2007 I have a notebook that is fairly new, with Windows Vista Home Premium on it. It has 1.5GB of RAM, and a 2GHz processor. Currently I am emulating OSX86 under VMWare Player, which runs slower than molasses, so I'm thinking about installing it... However, my father (being the Windows guy that he is), won't let me overwrite Vista on this notebook for the better of the two OSes, OS X. Is there any way to dual boot Vista and OS X on one 80GB hard drive, ie: Vista 30, OS X 50, or something? The hard drive is actually 74.2GB, so I'm thinking like 30GB for Vista and 44.2GB for OS X. Would that be reasonable for doing normal things? I'm just kinda sick of the 6GB limit in VMWare as well as the slowness of OS X. The dock takes like 5 seconds to realize "Hey! Magnitize!" Now, on the topic of wireless, how hard do you think it would be to hack an Intel wireless card driver for OS X? I would love to have a 90%~ functional Hackintosh, and wireless is like the first priority for me, right before sound and speed. If it won't work to dual boot Vista/OS X on one hard drive, then what is a good notebook hard drive to get for OS X that will work in this PC? Will a USB 2.0 external hard drive work? Thanks in advance... Sorry if this is in the wrong spot on the forum. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cbmkgd Posted June 18, 2007 Share Posted June 18, 2007 Of course it's possible, numerous guides have been made to dual-boot xp/osx or vista/osx. Check out devilhood's guide. There are others in the Tutorials (GeniusBar) subforum. Take your time, read on about possible problems here on InsMac, get experience from others' problems to possibly avoid the usual obstacles. There's a lot of knowledge in here and in the OSx86 wiki. When you repartition your laptop, be sure to use the proper tools to resize vista's partition, that the tools are known to work well with vista's ntfs (many people had problems with DiskDirector 2117). From the specs of your portable, try to search if someone else has the same thing and if he/she had success, etc. The sizes you mention seem ok, depends on what use each OS will have, what apps you're going to install in each, etc. You might want to have a common partition to share with both, if you don't use MacDrive to see osx partition from vista (you can see ntfs from osx with macfuse). You'll read more on these details in the forums here. Good luck, and don't rush. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pythonusr Posted June 18, 2007 Author Share Posted June 18, 2007 Wow. Thanks for the fast reply! Actually, I was thinking about wiping the computer first, then reinstalling my Vista then installing OS X. I've already used about 60GB on Vista, and, well, that's too much. I was thinking that I would reinstall Vista, then install only iTunes, Safari, and Paint.NET, then stop. Then, install OS X, and install GarageBand (2.5GB, right?) and iWorks '06. Then import my 10GB of music and then have a blast hacking it to work properly. I have a question for you though. If I install OS X on here, will I have to pass any activation things? I never had to on VMware, so I doubt it, but still, do I? And, will this hard drive work for OS X well? http://www.priorityelectronics.com/toshiba/mk8032gax.htm $100 is not bad for me. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cbmkgd Posted June 19, 2007 Share Posted June 19, 2007 Don't need to wipe Vista: uninstall stuff you don't want, defragment it well, then reduce its partition size enough to give space to OSX. Then follow one of the guides that suits you from the Tutorials (GeniusBar). Shouldn't be any need to re-activate vista (and since its legit, it wouldn't be a problem if you needed to). But if you want to reinstall vista, go for it, it's your choice. No need to activate/register with OSX. But if there's any official updates, DO NOT install them. Come to this forum first to see if they're safe; sometimes they're not and will scrap your OSX install... In that case, updates have to be 'prepared' to be accepted by hacktooshies. (I myself disable automatic updates notifications on my osx pc). As for your data, like music etc, I'd recommend a separate partition from your osx: if you scrap that one, you'd want to still have access to the stuff... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Soündless Posted June 19, 2007 Share Posted June 19, 2007 you should try posting this in osx86 section Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cyntax Posted June 19, 2007 Share Posted June 19, 2007 I have found the easiest way for me to dual boot, is to use a split partitions and Zboot (http://www.zbmsoft.com/). It was one of the only boot managers to work correctly with OSX. My setup is XP on primary Partition and OSX on secondary partition with a third FAT32 partition to share data between the two OSes. Works very well indeed. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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