advice on dual boot snow/xp

hello everyone!


i am actually a current pc owner, here in about a week im getting a new 13" mbp , ive got allot of data on my laptop right now and dont want to loose it, im to cheap to get an external HD to transfer data, so i was thinking about upgrading the mbp with a 500G HD, partitioning the 500G HD into sections and transferring the data from my current laptop onto the new hard drive ( my current laptop has two hd slots) and installing xp on that windows side of the HD then throwing the new 500G HD into the mbp and installing the mac OS on the other side of the HD .


im not sure how well this process would pan out, as im not familiar how boot camp works...

hopefully someone has good advice on this. from what ive read about boot camp it sounds like it clears a section and all that junk on its own, i just want to save the data on the windows machine before converting to a mac.

i feel like that's a pretty intensive idea to save data, perhaps some one has a better idea?

thanks for reading!

Please refer to the following Sticky Post in the Windows forum.

"It’s important to understand that Boot Camp is not actually a program that runs Windows, in fact, it’s a set of utilities to ease the process of installing Windows directly on your Mac on a separate partition. Boot Camp splits your hard disk into two volumes, one for your existing installation of OS X and one for Windows. After you’ve installed Boot Camp and Windows, you’ll be able to choose which Operating system you prefer to start your Mac in"


this is what i am interested in learning more about, if i were to pre install windows with data on a partition of a hard drive without using the boot camp program, upon installing boot camp on the mac OS side, would it recognize the windows side upon start up?

can i configure boot camp upon instal to just see that ive done the work? and use it at start up to switch OS's

or is there just some easy hot key to access the EFI(bios equivalent? ) to just tell it what to boot it in?

Simple answer - No.

Here is a walkthrough installing Win 7. Perhaps give it a read through to grasp a clearer understanding of the process. Link.