Various Questions / Concerns

[mattrstewart]

I have an Intel iMac 20" Core Duo.
I installed latest version of Bootcamp.
I have XP on one side, and OSX on the other.
I also have 2 LaCie external firewire 400 drives containing all my music / videos.


Question 1:
- When I boot in OSX, I can see the external drives, the OSX partition, and the XP partition. All of these can be read and written.
- When I boot in XP, I can only see the XP partition, nothing else. How can I make it so that I can see all the drives when in XP and have them read/write access?


Question 2:
I wanted to boot in BIOS to select the order for the scan for XP. For example...by default it looks in Floppy, then CD, then internal HD, then external HD ... and this takes like 2 mins to boot. I want to change this to look in internal HD first to speed it up. How do you boot in BIOS for this?


Question 3:
Should I be defragging the XP partition? and if yes...any ideas on a good, fast, and preferably free software to do this?


Question 4:
Because I have yet to find a "great" media center app for OSX, I wanted to setup a media center for XP side. Any ideas on a good app for this? And will it work with Apple Remote?

[zo219]

Question 4, I would hang on just a few more months ...

[mattrstewart]

Originally Posted by zo219

Question 4, I would hang on just a few more months ...

why? and please don't say appleTV

[DeltaMac]

Originally Posted by mattrstewart

Question 1:
- When I boot in OSX, I can see the external drives, the OSX partition, and the XP partition. All of these can be read and written.
- When I boot in XP, I can only see the XP partition, nothing else. How can I make it so that I can see all the drives when in XP and have them read/write access?

Question 2: How do you boot in BIOS for this?

Question 1: You can run some software like Macdrive. otherwise Windows can't see the Mac format drives at all.

Question 2: Your iMac doesn't have a BIOS - it has EFI, which most windows installs don't understand. One of the purposes for the Boot Camp software is to 'fake' the Windows installer into believing that your Mac has a BIOS.
You can set your boot drive in the Startup Disk (either in OS X System Preferences, or in the Control panel, if you are booted to Windows. You can also set the desired boot volume at boot by holding the Option key, which brings up the boot manager screen - showing all available boot partitions.

BootROM chooses the one that was last selected by the Startup Disk System Preference. The user can override this choice by holding down the Option key while the computer boots, which causes Open Firmware or EFI to display a screen for choosing the boot volume.

- from Apple developer docs

[zo219]

okay, then i won't say it. but what i'm interested in, is not so much the thing itself, but to see what possibilities it opens up.

[DeltaMac]

Why, what possibilities are you expecting?
Can you explain what you mean by 'it'?
What would you hope to do with it?

Question 3: XP has a de-frag utility built-in, in the system tools.

You may find that Leopard will show improved media support, in several different ways, not just software.

So far, XP does not support the IR port on the Intel Macs, which means that the Apple remote does not function yet in Windows.

[ex2bot]

it = Apple TV

mattrstewart, go to My Computer (in Windows) and right-click on your hd. Select Properties from the contextual menu and select the check disk option first before you defrag.

Doug