BIOS boot manager for Windows Vista Boot Camp Macbook partition
2014-07
Joi Henderson
I am trying to find the BIOS boot manager for my Windows Vista Boot Camp partition of my Macbook. How do I access this during sartup?
Greg Hewgill
A couple of years ago, I installed the Boot Camp beta on OS X, reserved 20 GB for Windows XP, and installed an XP in that partition. Since then, the Boot Camp beta expired and I used Parallels to run the XP in a VM from that partition. Now I want that 20 GB back.
I'm not terribly worried about the contents of the XP installation on that partition (I can just back up the data elsewhere), but if I can preserve it in a VM that would be a bonus. I would like to remove that partition and resize the OS X partition to occupy the full drive.
What's the proper way to do this?
Diago
Run the Boot Camp assistant and it will automatically start the removal process after some prompts.
You will need to use something like VMWare Converter to create a VM first if you want to keep the Windows Installation. You can then convert this to a Parallels VM.
Jasarien
You can use the Bootcamp Assistant (found in /Applications/Utilities) to restore your drive back to one partition.
Damien
Important thing to consider here is that there is a bug with Bootcamp that typically means that after you have removed a partition it has a hard time being able to do a new one and requires a fresh install of OSX should you ever wish to readd it at a later date!
Lance
Open Disk Utility. Select the Windows partition. Choose the "Erase" tab. Change the format to "Mac OS Extended (journaled)". Click the "Erase" button. Wait. When it is done, choose the "Partition" tab. Move the dividing line to the end (probably will be the bottom) of the graph. Click to apply.