OS X reinstall preserving boot camp dual boot?

dt22

dt22

dt22

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Afternoon,

Does anybody know if I reinstall OS X whether the bootloader is affected in anyway?
I appreciate the my Window partition will be untouched but I wanted to know if I could erase then clean install OS X or if I did that then installed the boot camp package again it would pick up the existing partition?

Anybody have any experience of doing this?


Cheers,

David
 
No it shouldn't because its not a bootloader as you might think of it in PC terms, its not static, it just looks for all bootable volumes on the computer. I may not be right, EVH will probably come along and enlighten us all. However its all ways a good idea to backup before reinstalling/formatting any thing.
 
unknowndomain said:
EVH will probably come along and enlighten us all.
Click to expand...
You rang? :p

f_Picture1m_1eebf8d.png


If you open boot in to the OS X CD you can access Disk Utility to format the drive.

From Disk Utility you can see all partitions on a drive, just select the HFS+ partition (that's the Macintosh HD partition by default) *as shown above*

Erase using the zero-fill option here, and it will ONLY touch the OS X partition.. it shouldn't affect XP if you leave the partition sizes as they are!

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=303572#faq0


How is the Windows XP partition created?

Boot Camp Assistant lets you easily create a partition for Windows XP to use without erasing your Mac OS X information. Boot Camp Assistant only works with an Intel-based Mac that has one hard disk partition. Boot Camp Assistant creates a second partition on your existing startup disk for the Windows XP operating system, or, if you have more than one internal hard drive installed, it will allow you to install Windows XP on another drive. You can choose the size of the Windows partition when running Boot Camp Assistant Beta, but it must be at least 5 GB and leave at least 5GB of free space on the disk for the Mac OS X partition.

For example, if you have an 80 GB hard drive with 50 GB of space in use (30 GB free), your Windows XP partition can be between 5 GB and 25 GB (30 minus 5) in size.

Note: Boot Camp Assistant does not erase your existing partition or existing Mac OS X installation when it creates a new partition for Windows XP.

Important: Do not use Disk Utility or third-party disk utilities to partition the drive before using Boot Camp Assistant--these will erase the disk.
Click to expand...

Judging from the above i'd say you're safe to erase OS X without fear of screwing up XP/Vista :)

Hope this helps.
 
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