I normally use a Mac to get things done. Of course there are times that require I use Windows (unless there's a Mac release of Active Directory management tools...), and when that happens I use Windows 7 running in VirtualBox.
Why?
Because I hate Windows 8.
Every time I've used it, I'm reminded of more reasons why I don't like it. And I've talked to many other people who have expressed the same first impression I had: the user interface was created only for tablets with touch screens. That is by far the most common opinion I run into. "If this were on a tablet, I'd probably like it more," they lament.
My son has a Mac. I said if he wanted a computer, he was either going to get a Mac or he'd have to learn how to support his own technology. For his purposes...which he swore was mostly Minecraft with a heavy does of watching YouTube videos...a Mac was perfectly fine.
Fast forward a bit; somewhere he was exposed to videos of Steam. He wanted to play some kind of video games that were only supported on Windows. Windows! "Please? Please? PLEAASE!?," he begged.
"If you want it, you have to buy it."
So he bought Windows. A boxed 8.1 DVD set. Ugh.
I eventually agreed as a birthday gift to install Windows using BootCamp on his MacBook Pro. If you're not familiar with BootCamp, it is a concession made by Apple for people who for some reason or another require not only Windows on their Mac, but direct access to the hardware. Usually it's because of a shortcoming in virtualization; some driver pukes or a piece of hardware's interface isn't perfectly emulated. Once in awhile it's because someone finds the small performance hit from virtualization to be unacceptable. For these occasions Apple released a suite of drivers and a configuration utility to assist in repartitioning your hard drive and installing a dedicated full installation of Windows on the Mac.
I have never been a fan of BootCamp. Part of the reason the Mac is great is because of OS X being tightly integrated with the hardware. Apple doesn't toss the operating system on as an afterthought. Windows more or less cripples a machine that was designed to work with OS X, and Apple has no reason to go out of their way to make the experience better.
But I agreed to try getting that overpriced Windows DVD to install on his Mac. I installed a 500GB hybrid drive...his existing drive was too small to adequately handle the installation. I used the BootCamp Assistant utility, included with OS X, to divide the drive into two partitions. BootCamp Assistant then took the ISO image I created from the 64 bit disc and applied the installation to an external USB drive, then tried to download support software. I had a slow connection so I let it run while I went to bed.
Woke up in the morning and tried the reboot. It wouldn't work. I mean, Windows 8.1 setup came up, but there was no keyboard or mouse. It was stuck at the setup screen.
Reboot. I held the command-R keys to get to recovery mode, and from there told it to boot to OS X. "Maybe the installation was corrupt, maybe I should try that again."
I re-ran the BootCamp Assistant and re-created the install. It complained because a partition already existed for Windows, but then dutifully reformatted the external drive for the installation process and tried downloading BootCamp drivers. After sitting for several minutes, it puked an error hinting that for some reason known only to robots and silicon gods it couldn't download the utilities.
This happened a few times. I'd reattempt the installation process, only to have it throw an error at me.
Eventually I gave up and told it only to create the install disk. I'd worry about the install of BootCamp utilities later.
Reboot...nothing. It just wasn't able to run the installer properly. What the hell? Bad ISO image? Not supporting the USB drive because it wasn't fast enough or recognized properly at boot?
I put in the Windows DVD and tried the install. Booting from the DVD worked; I had my keyboard and mouse working and it prompted for the 25 character key. Finally...installed the operating system. Only...no BootCamp utility. And no drivers. Including the network driver, so I couldn't get the laptop to a point where it could download drivers and troubleshoot on its own. Worse, it didn't have the utility for booting to OS X from the system tray.
I ended up telling it to reboot and using the recovery boot option to choose OS X as the startup disk. Yes, the Option key is supposed to give you a menu to choose your startup disk...somehow that key is not working on his laptop.
I poked around and discovered a that you can download the BootCamp utilities bundle from Apple. It was nearly a gig in size; I let it trickle in over a couple of hours. Once that had completed I saved it to a USB drive and rebooted to Windows.
Only Windows refused to recognize the drive. Windows could tell the USB drive was plugged in, but wouldn't recognize it as being properly formatted with a filesystem, no matter what filesystem was formatted on the drive.
I rebooted back to OS X and found a spare burnable DVD. I burned a disk of the unzipped drivers and setup program and rebooted back to Windows; huzzah! It sees the utilities!
Then Windows puked an error. The app could not be run.
I did a quick search and discovered the specific version of the download I used may not be able to work on that model Mac. There was a slightly lower version that was supposed to work, though. Another gig download.
At this point I was no longer at home; we were on vacation, and I didn't have access to another disc on which to burn the drivers. I'd have to find another way to get the downloaded files to a spot Windows could see the files.
While the second version of the support files installer completed I started transferring two other files down; one, Parallels, a virtualization application that could run the BootCamped Windows installation in a VM and should also easily see the local OS X filesystem as a shared folder. The other was an NTFS driver from Paragon software.
Another clarification; OS X can see the Windows partition. The problem is that it will mount the drive read-only. By default...without playing with some flags and command-line magic...OS X cannot write to the partition. The Paragon driver was theoretically less involved to try; it has a trial period that would let me transfer the file in question to the Windows partition.
Installed driver, reboot again to OS X, and copied the file over. No errors! YES! Now to reboot to...where's Windows?
Yeah, for reasons I'm not entirely sure of the Windows startup drive disappeared as an option from the startup disk list. sigh
I uninstalled the Paragon software and the Windows drive reappeared as a startup disk option. YAY!
Reboot. Unzipped the new BootCamp utilities. Ran setup. "Do you want to let <setup.exe> make changes to your system?"
YES DAMMIT.
"Sorry, this app cannot run."
DAMMIT!
Wait...what if...
Yeah. I gave a full Fullerton sigh when I realized that at some point in my swapping things around and trying to get Windows to install properly the 64 bit and 32 bit DVD's were swapped. BootCamp was for 64 bit Windows and the 32 bit version was currently installed. No no no no no...
I rebooted again and wrangled the 64 bit DVD to install. Once more...I think at this point I'd entered the 25 digit code three or four times at this point...I entered that damned code and managed to reach the custom install selection. I highlighted the partition and told it to format it to a clean slate.
"I can't install there. The partition type is not GPT."
The fuck?
Fine. Delete the partition, Windows. Recreate and format it.
"I can't install there. It's not GPT!"
Flabbergasted that Windows isn't apparently smart enough to create the proper partition itself, I rebooted to OS X and opened Disk Utility. From there I deleted that partition and recreated it, which confirmed it was created by default as a GPT partition...something else must have altered it during the installation process. I formatted it as FAT for good measure.
Time to iterate through my install checklist again. Rebooted with the DVD. Made sure it was 64 bit. Re-enter that damned key again. Custom install. Highlight the partition. "I can't install there. It's not NTFS!"
"Format it, dumbass."
"Okay!"
This time, no error. It installed.
Booted, finished "configuring hardware." Told me in big cartoony letters how wonderful Windows was going to be. Let me configure a user account. No hardware was working beyond the keyboard, mouse and display.
Okay, so it was the non-64 bitness keeping the setup for BootCamp utilities working...let's stick in the disc I had made. This time the original "not gonna do it" error didn't appear; it gave me a different error, that it wasn't meant for my model Mac! In this case it was a better error, though, because now it was the installer giving me a specific error and not Windows puking a generically unhelpful error.
Reboot to recovery boot. Change startup disk to OS X. Reboot.
Reinstall Paragon driver. Reboot. Copy the older version of BootCamp utilities over to Windows. Uninstall Paragon. Select Windows as the startup disk. Reboot.
Unzip the utilities in Windows. Run setup.
It worked.
Holy shit. It worked. It's been two days of downloading and reconfiguring and troubleshooting...and now it was working. No more warning symbols on the network hardware. Webcam worked. Bluetooth. Updated USB. It was all working!
This wasn't even a case of being irritated with the interface as I normally experienced...I'd managed to remember that I had to scroll the pointer along the right side to actually find a menu item I wanted, or to even find the damned shutdown menu. I was accidentally running into the fact that Windows 8 has a cartoony, dumbed down interface to tell me something that also was available from an actual, more familiar control panel version when I accidentally took a wrong turn in the access methods (example: there's a Windows Update that gives you some kind of text wall status, and another that uses the Windows Update control panel...not that either one gives real-time updates on status.) At this point I didn't even have the energy to complain about the unhelpfully generic error messages (YOU KNEW THE PROBLEM WAS RELATED TO A 64 BIT DRIVER ON A 32 BIT OS, YOU BASTARD.)
Some people would blame Apple. I can't. Not just out of fanboyism, but because I really suspect that as far as they're concerned, if you want to run Windows you should have a PC. There's a reason I said BootCamp was a concession...after following Apple news stories for years, reading about Steve Jobs, and paying attention to the details Apple puts into their products, I honestly think they find the notion of Windows on their hardware a distasteful pile of wretchedness they tolerate only to keep gamers from using it as an excuse to refuse trying Apple products. The drivers seem almost half-hearted; they usually work, but tend to lag behind Windows releases when updates are needed. And they aren't necessarily great; for example, failing to support dual-Thunderbolt displays. Windows will see one, but leave the other blank. Why? Apple doesn't seem to care to address it.
And frankly I can see why. The OS is coupled to the hardware. Apple tossed basic support over the fence and shrugged before walking away.
I can't blame Microsoft for the lack of Apple support. It would be nice if they saw more of that hardware by default, but...meh. Apple comes with OS X. Microsoft shouldn't necessarily have to support a system that isn't really meant to run their product.
Nope. The experiences I had getting BootCamp to run is pretty much the kind of pain I expect in trying to shoehorn an operating system Apple doesn't like onto a hardware configuration Microsoft doesn't want to support. Part of me expects this setup to break in the near future...just one update away from another pain point.
What I can say:
I initially told my son he would have to install BootCamp. He should learn how to use his system properly, and if he really wanted this he should do it. And I made no secret that I was disappointed when he didn't make much effort to do this, opting instead to beg until his birthday for us to do this for him. At the time I didn't expect it to be this much of a hassle, though...there's absolutely no way he could have figured this out on his own without a week of study and probably a lot of back and forth on the apple.stackexchange.com site, learning about partitions, formatting, and how drivers interact on systems. A non-problematic install would have been one thing, but something was definitely broken on his system's ability to properly boot from the USB drive, and something with the Apple download site wasn't cooperating half the time with our slow connection to get the proper utilities in the first place.
Windows 8x sucks at giving proper error messages. C'mon...how hard is it to know the error was running a 64 bit installer on a 32 bit operating system?
I'm pretty sure Apple could have created a read/write NTFS driver. In fact, the ability is in OS X...just shut off by default. You can follow some semi-documented procedure to enable it and mount an NTFS volume if you're willing to risk it...I'm just afraid of what risks they're not talking about.
Microsoft is supposedly making it easier...free, even...to get Windows 10. I pray to $DEITY that means they're getting rid of that goddamned 25-character key. I must have entered it five or six times over the course of this ordeal, and every time it was installed before starting a process that would end in NOPE NOT GONNA DO IT HAHA!
Oh, and after getting the key entered the final time and getting drivers working and getting online...Windows still needed activation, so if I didn't get the network driver working...which in one iteration I had this situation...Windows was warning me that I had to call Microsoft to activate it before certain things would work properly. I was even more pissed at the fact this was a purchased, non-pirated, store-box DVD edition of Windows having me enter...and enter...and enter...that 25 character code and it still had another hoop to jump. OS X? It'll reinstall over the Internet by booting to recovery mode. No questions. Just a few clicks. Screw Windows.
If BootCamp fails and you need to reinstall, you may have to delete the partition from Disk Utility. Recreate it from Disk Utility. I reformatted it as a FAT partition so it would be visible from within Windows' setup...if it's using a GUID partition table, Windows should be willing to see and format it.
If you're installing BootCamp utilities separately, make sure you get the correct version for your Mac hardware. Unlike most of the OS X operating system and drivers, BootCamp is finicky.
I suspect Parallels would have worked to bridge my software-transfer problem. Paragon worked in this case, so far without cruft being visible after the uninstaller was run. Trying to get pain-in-the-ass software like this is great for reminding you that you can get creative to solve problems. The stress probably does shorten your life a little, too, though.
Last thing...don't run BootCamp unless you really, really need to. Parallels is a fantastic product. VirtualBox works well most of the time and for most purposes. BootCamp forces you to get meh driver support and sacrifice a fixed portion of your hard drive. If you're going to use it, have a really good reason to do so.
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to see if I have some more Bacardi in the kitchen. This installation of Windows has left me with an extraordinary amount of stress to burn off...
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