Saturday, October 28, 2006

Auf Wiedersehen OS X

Good riddance more like

I'm sure you will have noticed the numerous recent posts about my irritations with Apple's OS X, and it's come to a crashing crescendo of doom and destruction.

I am typing at 04:46 somewhere in Staffordshire, at the prestigious CentraLAN 14 Lan Gaming event. It would be a tonne (imperial not metric) of fun if it wasn't for the VAST amount of space that OS X took up. Despite accounting for 30GB of music, 5GB of applications and 15GB of system, there was still a missing 10-20GB of space that was taken up by forces as yet still unknown.

So, I attempted to repartition the drive to give a new install of Windows (this hurts me alot, because I had got Windows just right; it's never been just right before and so I was reluctant to start again) the maximum that FAT32 could make good use of (32GB). I ran into trouble right away. I tried using the BootCamp wizard, no dice. I tried using the diskutil resizeVolume command in the Terminal, no ball. I almost tried using the Install Disks to repartition them, but then I noticed it would only do it destructively. These methods complained that there wasn't enough free space to allocate another 32GB partition, which there wasn't. It's just that I couldn't figure out where it had all gone...

At this point I thought, why not just start afresh. I now almost hate OS X, why not try and dump it now. I had really nothing to lose since my Windows installation was up in smoke (along with CSS and numerous other games (like Transport Tycoon)) since I had used the BootCamp wizard to restore the partition back to one big HFS+ partition.

So off I went on my merry way, unknowing whether I'd be able to install ONLY Windows on the beast (my laptop, not Satan). Windows installed fine onto the big partition (of course after a quick NTFS format) and is now running. Sorry I didn't graciously build up to the climax then BOOM unleash it all at once in all of it's magnificent awe-inspiring jaw-dropping mediocrity. But that's just life.

I now have buckets of space available to Windows and don't need to worry about some bloatware taking up all my valuable gaming space. Of course this means I won't be able to program in a Linux/Unix environment, but I'm sure I'll be able to figure something out.

So. In a nutshell. It IS possible to only install Windows on a Mac (a MacBook Pro anyway) answering my previous wondering from a post lost in the dark clutches of lore.

Eddie will be either sad, or apathetic. Damn fanboy... =P

Apologies if this post is slightly disjointed, I had 4 hours sleep last night, and it is now 20 hours since I fell out of bed. Wish me all the luck in the world that I actually manage to stay awake past the 24h mark. I've never been able to accomplish it before.

W00t!!! GAME-AGE!!!

MWAHAHAHAHAHA. Ha. Ahem.