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