Fusion 1.0 corrupts Leopard Boot Camp partition

[mckoder]

I did a clean install of Leopard (final) on my MacBook. I created a Boot Camp partition and installed Windows XP Professional on it. I then installed Apple drivers. Now Leopard and Windows XP are both working fine. I then installed Fusion 1.0. I chose the Boot Camp partition in Fusion. At this point I think Fusion writes something to the Boot Camp partition. Next I proceeded to boot XP using Fusion. Windows wouldn't boot. Instead Windows gives me a text menu where one of the options is to start in Safe Mode. I chose Safe Mode and it still wouldn't boot. I keep getting this menu. I then shutdown Leopard and tried to reboot the machine in Windows XP. It wouldn't boot. I get the same menu, and even choosing Safe Mode doesn't boot. Looks like choosing Boot Camp option in Fusion corrupted the XP. I tried to repair XP and that didn't work. In the end I had to reformat the Boot Camp partition and reinstall XP.

My questions: Has this issue been seen before? Is this because of an incompatibility of Fusion 1.0 and Leopard? If I use Fusion 1.1 will this problem go away?

[waygeekierthanu]

I've been using 1.0 for a while with the Leopard WWDC release without issue, however I just upgraded to 1.1 and it gives me permission errors when trying to hit boot camp. I did a chmod 777 down the whole tree and get the same error. I uninstalled 1.1 and put the 1.1.0-57519 back on and it reads it fine!

[Guddler]

I had this issue with 1.1 using the same install steps as you.

Selecting to boot from the last known good option from the text menu resolved the issue for me.

[mckoder]

Guddler, can you clarify what you mean by "resolved" the issue? Presumably you are now able to boot into the Boot Camp partition, without using Fusion. But does Fusion work also? Are you able to run Leopard and Windows simultaneously? When you chose the Last Known Good option presumably that reverts changes made by Fusion to Windows. In that case Fusion can't be running optimally. (Because Fusion made changes to Windows for a reason.)

[Guddler]

Guddler, can you clarify what you mean by "resolved" the issue?

Sure, when i say resolved, I mean completely resolved

When I selected that option from the menu it was when I was trying to boot the partition as a virtual machine from within OSX (having already realised, like yourself that it wouldn't boot natively either) since the keyboard doesn't work on my iMac at that stage of a native windows boot. After I'd selected that option the virtual machine brought up windows quite happily as though nothing had ever gone wrong. I gave it long enough to settle down (all disk activity etc.) and then carried on with the installation. Ie, installing the VMWare Tools.

Apart from a bit of flakiness that I think was down to having 3d Graphics acceleration enabled things have been fine since. I've been using Windows from within OSX (as a VM) and also booting into the Windows partition natively to play Half Life 2: Episode 1. In fact, I spent most of last night doing that - it's been so long since I've had a decent enough spec machine that I'd forgotten what it was like to be able to play games one a PC (okay, iMac!)

Awesome stuff! And now just the one windows partition and the one OSX partition instead of 1 partition for Tiger, 1 for Leopard and then a bucket load of space taken up by both a Vista VM and an XP VM

Hope that helps you a little?

[mckoder]

Thanks, that helps a lot.

It does cause me concern though that Fusion has such an obvious bug. Unlike Windows, Macs have limited hardware configurations, and my configuration is not unusual. So it should be easy for VMware to reproduce this bug.