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    Dual boot Leopard and XP on MBP questions.

    Discussion in 'Apple and Mac OS X' started by cheapnoob, Jun 11, 2008.

  1. cheapnoob

    cheapnoob Notebook Enthusiast

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    Before I buy a macbook pro, I have a few questions. I want it to dual boot leopard and XP. I know this is easily done with boot camp, but I want a extra partition for XP for data. For example, leopard partition, xp partition and data/backup partition. Is this possible and how easy is it to do this?

    If for any reason (viruses, crashes), can I format and reinstall XP without touching the leopard and data partition? If yes, how easy is it to do this? I'm familar with windows but not so familar with osx.
     
    cheapnoob, Jun 11, 2008
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  2. saturnotaku

    saturnotaku Notebook Nobel Laureate

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    Honestly? Best way to handle data backups is to get yourself an external hard drive. If you need to nuke your Windows install, it's easy to do via the Boot Camp assitant in OS X, but that will take everything down with it. A Firewire drive or external enclosure will provide the best results for data transfer. You could also partition the external drive to include FAT32 (for reading and writing between Windows and OS X, but there is a 4 GB file size limit); Mac OS extended (for OS X, obviously); and NTFS (for reading and writing from Windows and reading from OS X).

    Having a "backup" partition contained on the same hard drive as two operating systems really isn't a good idea.
     
    saturnotaku, Jun 11, 2008
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