BootCamp makes users reinstall OS X or buy software that shouldn’t be needed, in order to load another operating system on Apple hardware. My frustration with Apple products — particularly with OS X — is slowly but surely raising my blood pressure to levels I have never seen during my marriage to Windows.
When Apple announced the switch to the Intel architecture in 2006, nerds everywhere rejoiced. A Unix operating system with an Apple GUI along with the x86 architecture must have been a fantasy until then. It should be trivial to run any operating system on the machine, making “the switch” from Windows or Linux to OS X painless and comforting. BootCamp Beta was released in OS X Tiger 10.4 that allowed users to re-partition an existing hard drive to FAT32 and run Windows on it. After the beta, BootCamp was released into the wild in OS X Leopard 10.5. Life was good.
Except when it isn’t. Turns out, when you start to repartition the hard drive, BootCamp expects you to not have used to your hard drive at all. It expects your disk to contain almost no fragmentation. But the friendly error message really gives no useful hints:
The disk cannot be partitioned because some files cannot be moved. Back up the disk and use Disk Utility to format it as a single Mac OS Extended (Journaled) volume. Restore your information to the disk and try using Boot Camp Assistant again.
After lots of searching, I found that my drive must be heavily fragmented, despite Apple’s claims that this can almost never happen. Even if it did, they claim, there will probably be no performance gains. Notice that they completely fail to make any mention of BootCamp in the support article.
So, Apple’s solution is to back up my hard drive, reinstall Leopard, and restore it? That seems like a major PITA, and might alienate some Windows power users. But, to be fair, they also show a link to iDefrag — software that can defrag your hard drive — for $35.
IMHO, the whole thing is ridiculous. In order to use an advertised feature of their operating system, one that makes “The Switch” so much easier, I either have to shell out $35 to defrag the hard drive, or $100 to back up my hard drive to an external device (Time Machine stealthily fills up and chews up external drives), and lose about 2 days of backup, installation and restoration — all while not being able to unplug my laptop or take my work with me.
I guess I must be the only person in the Universe to actually want to use an Apple product to its intended and advertised capacity, not just surf the web, write documents, or play with Photoshop.
/rant