Dual-booting OS X & Windows XP – Limited to 10.6 Snow Leopard?

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Dual-booting OS X & Windows XP – Limited to 10.6 Snow Leopard?

I have an October 2008 vintage MacBook Pro 17-inch*, which will shortly be revitalised with an OCZ Vertex 4 512GB solid state drive, and with the boost in available disc space, I’m exploring options for dual-booting OS X and Windows.

* Model ID: MacBookPro 4,1 – Order No: MB766LL/A – Mfg. Part No: A1261 – full spec at EveryMac:

» http://everymac.com/systems/apple/macbook_pro/specs/macbook-pro-core-2-duo-2.5-1 7-early-2008-penryn-specs.html

I have installation discs for:

• Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard

• Windows XP Home Edition SP2

My understanding is that the Boot Camp version in OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard will allow me to set up dual-booting between these two OS versions. My natural geek instinct would be to upgrade OS X → 10.7 Lion → 10.8 Mountain Lion, but as I understand it the Boot Camp versions in 10.7 Lion and 10.8 Mountain Lion only support Windows 7.

Q. Does this mean that if a successfully dual-booting ‘10.6 Snow Leopard + Windows XP’ MacBook Pro has its OS X upgraded (→ 10.7 Lion → 10.8 Mountain Lion), it will no longer dual-boot Windows XP?

BTW, I’m aware that I can run a virtualised Windows XP inside Oracle VM VirtualBox under OS X 10.7 Lion and 10.8 Mountain Lion (and other virtualisation software is also available); I’m interested in the reduced-complexity full-throttle option of dual-booting Windows XP.

MacBook Pro, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8), MacBookPro 4,1 – MB766LL/A – A1261

Posted on Oct 31, 2012 3:48 AM

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Answer 1

Oct 31, 2012 6:13 AM in response to dalinian

To answer your question, I will give you 2 answers. First off, it is not officially supported, so it may work, but if it doesn't you can't get support from Apple to make it work again. Now that I have given the official answer, I will give you what I consider to be the "real answer". I have not done this myself, but I have read from others that they have done just what you are looking to do. I will add the warning that I have read from others that when they performed the upgrade, it did do something which caused the Boot Camp to stop working, and they could not get it to work again, so it seems to be a crap shoot. Keep in mind that installing Lion or Mountain Lion wants to put a recovery partition on your boot volume, and Boot Camp only supports a total of 4 partitions on your MBP internal drive, so the EFI, MacOS, MBR, Boot Camp & Recovery partitions gives you too many partitions on the drive. If you can perform the install without creating the Recovery partition, then you have a much better chance of it all working properly.

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Answer 2

Niel

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Oct 31, 2012 9:17 AM in response to dalinian

Mac OS X 10.7 and 10.8 can coexist with existing Windows XP and Vista partitions, but cannot be used to create new ones.

(71220)

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Answer 3

dalinian Author

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Nov 5, 2012 12:48 PM in response to Niel

Thanks for your responses. My plans were somewhat undermined by those two discs I mentioned in my OP:

• Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard – lacked any Boot Camp software

• Windows XP Home Edition SP2 – was an Upgrade version

So I tracked down a torrent version of Windows 7 (thanks to http://isohunt.com ), upgraded OS X to 10.8 Mountain Lion, and used its Boot Camp software to create a dual-booting Mountain Lion/Windows 7 set up – all of which works beautifully well. The first fruit of this endeavour, and the primary motivating factor for creating the dual-boot setup, was un-bricking my Samsung Galaxy Note with a Windows-only program, and getting it to share files with Mountain Lion via USB cable. So I'm pleased to report that I got to where I wanted to be.

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