Boot Camp
From Mac Guides
Boot Camp is an Apple solution to dual-booting Windows XP or Windows Vista on Intel Macs. Boot Camp 1.0 for Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger arrived initially as a public beta on April 5, 2006. The public beta expired on September 30, 2007. Boot Camp 2.0 is included with every copy of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, and Boot Camp 3.0 is included with Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard.
By WWDC 2006, the Boot Camp Beta achieved half a million downloads.
Contents |
Components
There are three major independent components to Boot Camp.
The Firmware
Provides the ability to boot "legacy" MBR based OSes. Ships preinstalled on all but the earliest Intel based Macs from 2006.
Boot Camp Assistant
Boot Camp Assistant is a non-destructive partition tool that creates space for a Windows install on your internal HDD. If you so desire, you can partition the drive manually using Disk Utility or another partition tool.
The Drivers
Since Version 2.x these have been provided on your OS X install disc in a separate, hidden partition which is visible from Windows. It is generally recommended to use the latest drivers available for your system, even if you do not upgrade your OS X. e.g. The Boot Camp 3.x drivers from Snow Leopard provide many improvements over the 2.x drivers from Leopard, and can be used even on systems running Leopard.
Recent Discussion
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See Also
- Apple's Boot Camp site
- Apple's Boot Camp Installation & Setup Guide
- Booting Windows on the Mac
- Booting Windows XP From An External Drive
