Having just been and bought a copy of Windows XP Pro with SP2 – which I must say was a very strange experience – I am now in the process of installing it on my Mac.

Having installed BootCamp, I worked through partitioning my MacBook Pro’s hard disk to give 10 precious gigs to Windows. Restarting from the XP install disk was a doddle, and now, would you believe it, it’s installing on my Mac.

Currently, Setup is formatting the partition into NTFS format (I went for the default of NTFS withouth the quick option). Big word of warning – when you get to the screen where Windows install asks you which disk to format and use, Make Sure You Select The Disk Named C:. You don’t want to install over Mac OS X by mistake, now do you?

Aha – just reading the BootCamp FAQs… Mac OS X can read and write FAT disks, but only read NTFS. That’s a pain. Maybe I should have chosen FAT instead. Bah.

An aside whilst formatting takes place: When I bought Virtual PC about 6 months ago, it came with a full XP Pro license key, but no stand-alone install disk for XP Pro. Instead, you get a virtual disk image, on CD, ready to use with Virtual PC. I should be okay to use the license code with my Intel Mac, right?

Another aside (since formatting takes a while): I discovered an even more ideal solution last night, in the form of a beta of Parallels Workstation. This is more like the Virtual PC route, but much faster – emulating operating systems whilst Mac OS X is running. My guess is that BootCamp will do this too one day, but that’s just a guess. I’ll be trying Parallels later, but the biggest snag so far looks like it can’t use real disks as its hard disks – so, I’ll have to install Windows again to use it with Parallels Workstation. Perhaps that Virtual PC license code for XP will come in useful after all.

Formatting now done, took about 5 mins for a 10Gb partition (7200rpm). Setup copying files also took about 5 minutes. We’re now rebooting into Windows…

…and here it is! All stretched across the screen due to MacBook widescreen-ness. Heh – it talks about “An exciting new look”. You betcha :-)

Setup will complete in approximately 35 minutes, it says here. Devices are being installed, that kind of thing. Heh – “Your computer will be faster and more reliable”, says one of the installer splash screens. You reckon?

Usual Windows installer gubbins going on, such as changing my location preferences to be “English (United Kingdom)” in about 10 places. Bah.

Crikey this is boring.

Aha – here we go. A restart, a bit more installation and user account setup, and we have Windows!

Slight snag. The XP disk is still in the CD drive of the MacBook Pro – but I can’t eject it, as the Mac’s Eject button doesn’t work until you install the Mac drivers. From the CD. Which I can’t put in the CD drive, as the XP disk is in there.

Thankfully (for all you non-Windows users), I know to go Start > My Computer, then select the CD (on drive D:), and choose File > Eject. Phew!

So, in goes the Mac Drivers CD (as burnt by the BootCamp assistant). Select the language (no UK English, as ever with Apple) and InstallShield does its magic.

Aside: I’ve noticed a “USB Video Device” under “Scanners and Cameras” in the My Computer view. I wonder if that’s the iSight?

A bunch of installation happens for the Mac drivers – it’s now Registering Product. Pom-te-pom. This is taking a while. Aha:

The software you are installing for this hardware:

ATI Mobility Radeon X1600

has not passed the Windows Logo testing yada yada yada.

I choose to click “Continue Anyway”.

Up pops a Welcome To The Found New Hardware Wizard. At the same time, a window pops up behind, saying “The software you are installing has not passed Windows Logo testing yada yada yada”. I’ll answer this one first, with a “Continue Anyway”.

Here’s another one – for the “Atheros AR5006X Wireless Network Adapter”. Continue Anyway.

Various “found new hardware” bubbles appear in the system tray, and a console pops up to do something audio-based. it all goes away, as does that Found New Hardware wizard I ignored earlier (which I did nothing with)…

I am left with the Macintosh Drivers Wizard saying it has finished – so, “Yes, I want to restart my computer now”. I Click “Finish”!

Windows restarts…

…and we’re back at the Windows login screen (I added two users), at full Mac screen resolution this time. Click on my name to log in…

…Desktop Help tells me that my ATI graphics accelerator can use a TV for my computer’s display. Woo. I’m choosing to ignore that for now.

The Found New Hardware wizard pops up, and (with the Mac Drivers CD still in the drive) I select the top option and continue. Apple Built-In Bluetooth is installed successfully.

Some wireless networks are detected – let’s try and connect to mine…

…so far so good, it’s asking for the WEP key. My network uses 64 bit WEP, so I type in the hex passcode for it – and we’re on!

What else? Well, I have a new mini thing in my System Tray, which looks like the Mac’s System Preferences “Displays” icon. it gives me a simple slider for the screen volume. Perhaps over-keenly, I try out F1 on the MacBook Pro keyboard to adjust the brightness, and end up launching 20 copies of the Windows Help and Support Centre. Hmm, won’t do that again.

Likewise for the volume function keys – seems like they don’t work.

I have an ATI item in the system tray, which gives me a choice of resolutions and 16BPP or 32BPP. Nice.

Opening Internet Explorer, and it all works via my wireless network straight off. Good stuff!

I use “Synergy” to share a mouse and keyboard between my two Macs – let’s see if it will work between the Mac when it’s being a Windows box. Yup – works perfectly. This is all very nice :-)

Update: Synergy being a little jerky. It feels a bit like it did when I first tried Synergy, and it connected over the wireless rather than wired network. More testing needed there.

I’ve just spotted the Startup Disk control panel in the Windows Control Panels list. Works very similarly to the Mac OS X one, with the option to choose your disk, and also to start up in Target Disk mode.

Update: As expected, Windows XP can’t see or read the Mac OS X partition (since it can’t read Mac-formatted disks generally). So, I’ve just installed the MacDrive 6.1 free trial, to see if that makes the Mac partition show up.

After the restart, sure enough, there’s my Mac partition as drive F: for me to use. From a preliminary test, it seems to work pretty well. So, it’s an unfortunate extra purchase – $49.95 – but useful nonetheless.

So, all in all, this has worked remarkably well. Having installed Windows on a number of PCs before, this is as painless as it has been. Needs some proper testing – but I have to say, good work Apple :-) I’ve already got one colleague (who’s a Vaio user, and uses Windows, but covets the industrial design of a Mac big-time) very interested. All we need now is virtualization with the same hard disk, and we’re laughing!

Update: Being a brave soul, I thought I’d try and install IIS in order to view the web sites I have hosted on the Mac partition. Generally speaking, the install of IIS worked fine, and it seems to be serving up files with no problem. But – possibly due to some incompatibilities between IIS, MacDrive and the Mac formatted disk – I’ve found that files on my Mac drive with .js and .php extensions are being shown as .js.txt and .php.txt when I view them in my file browser in Windows XP. Trying to rename them causes the browser to hang, something I’ve only been able to remedy via a reboot.

This leads me on to another, slightly wider-reaching problem. I have yet to find a way to press ctrl-alt-delete in WinXP when it is running on the MacBook Pro. I have a control key and an alt key, but no delete key (as the MacBook Pro’s delete key is mapped to BackSpace, not Delete – correctly, I should add). This is something of a problem when Windows programs stop responding!

Update: I found out the problem with my PHP files (from the Mac OS X partition) appearing as filename.php.txt. Seems as though MacDrive didn’t know about .php and .css files, and so it was treating them as .txt for the purposes of Windows. Adding php and css to MacDrive’s list of file mappings solved the problem.

So, I now have IIS installed under XP Pro, and I installed PHP 5.1.2 just now too (using the Windows Binarys PHP 5.1.2 installer). I’ve set IIS to use my Mac OS X partition’s Web Sites directory as its root. I can now view all of my web sites (stored on the Mac OS X partition), hosted via IIS!

Update: Synergy seems to be playing nicely now. I think it was a network bandwidth issue, not a compatability issue.

Update: I’ve just tried installing Win XP Pro on the Parallels Workstation beta, but after the initial install phase, when the virtual machine restarts, Parallels Workstation took down my Mac – one of those grey screen “Hold down the power button” moments. On restart, it won’t open that virtual machine any more. So that’s a big “no luck” for Parallels from this user. Bah.

Update: That “USB Video Device” I mentioned doesn’t work – and when I double click on it in Windows Explorer, it crashed Windows Explorer. Its properties list it as a USB Video Device, Manufactured by Microsoft. It’s not happy. Anyhow, Apple say that the iSight isn’t supported under WinXP (at least not yet) so maybe I ws a little hasty in getting excited.

Update: I found out how to press control-alt-delete on the MacBook Pro! You can download some Microsoft tools to remap the delete key – but even better, you can just press shift-control-escape to do the same as control-alt-delete! Thanks to a nice person called “gda” for posting this tip on the Apple Discussion boards.