One of my missions of late has been to consolidate my machines and ultimately get down to one workstation if possible. This should eliminate 1-2 machines and give me more flexibility to run different OS’s and browsers as-needed.
With my copy of Windows 7 Pro on preorder still I grabbed a copy of the RC and went to work. The first problem I ran into was that the Windows 7 installer refused to install on my Boot Camp partition no matter what I did. Even formatting the partition didn’t let me get past this. As best I can tell this only affects people with Mac Pros… something about the installer wants to be on Disk 0. What this means is that I had to install a dedicated drive for Windows, and then physically remove my primary drive while I installed Windows.
After doing this Windows 7 happily installed and it wasn’t long thereafter that I was patched up and ready to go.
Next on the list was to install VMWare Fusion and get it configured. While VMWare does not actually support Windows 7 just yet, they do have some instructions on how to get it setup.
Before I did this though I fired up VMWare and saw that my Boot Camp partition was already available. VMWare Tools installed and Windows booted up just fine. Now this may be due to some better support for Boot Camp in Snow Leopard (OSX 10.6) or just luck. I will keep playing with it but so far things are working quite well.
It is worth noting that VMWare sees it as Vista 64. Hey I am okay with that, so long as it works!
Update: After booting back into Snow Leopard after being in Windows 7 for a while I had some oddness in VMWare. I had a second VM pop up for no reason. This one was defaulted to Windows XP and couldn’t be deleted while my original could. I changed it to the recommended setting for Windows Server 2008 64 bit. I also couldn’t change the settings of my original VM so I canned it. After booting up the VM there was no longer networking support. I believe this was because it tried to load incompatible drivers. I tried reinstalling VMWare tools, updating to the 2.0.6 beta and then reinstalling again, but to no avail. What did work was to:
- go into network settings
- remove the network adapter
- and re-add it again (as NAT)
I restarted Windows and networking was functioning properly.