Bootcamp "Thing"

[Dieter3]

Hello All,

I have what I think is a very odd problem, but probably stems from my understanding (or lack thereof...) of Apple's fusion system and/or Bootcamp.

Machines in question are iMac 14,3 that originally had the 1.1TB Fusion drive (128GB + 1TB). The 1TB drives are slow rotational and only SATA II even though the bus is SATA III. Win7 under Bootcamp booted very slowly as a result and general performance is lackluster.

Need performance over space, so removing the 1TB drives and replacing with SATA III, 240GB SSDs. - WOW. Goes without saying, but NOW they jam.

PROBLEM - Installing Bootcamp destroys the OS X partition, and formats the 128GB SSD as MS-DOS!! Huh.

So, here's my process - HELP!

1) Boot in recovery, use terminal app to determine and destroy logical volume group.
2) Install OS X Yosemite from Apple on the 128GB SSD card.
3) Disassemble machine, install 240GB drive, reassemble, boot.
4) Run Bootcamp - gives a couple of options at this point - to create a partition on the 240GB drive or use the whole drive - EITHER OPTION = destroyed OS X partition.
5) What I have been doing is setting the Bootcamp partition size to 160GB so I've got a spare partition to use for data excess.
6) - Windows installs just fine (after telling setup to format the drive as NTFS) and runs perfectly.

But as stated - OS X is destroyed at this point, only the 10.10 Recovery Partition comes up if you hold down Option at boot, with Windows.

7) Boot from external HD with OS X, run disk utility to reformat the 128GB as OS X ext.journaled, and re-image the drive.

8) - NOW OS X and Windows co-exist happily together.

But what's up with that? This has never happened to me on a non-fusion Mac. So, I've gotta be doing something wrong, out of sequence, or otherwise as it relates to the fusion system.

Any suggestions on a different way to do this process? Thanks all.

 

[chscag]

I would avoid messing with the fusion drive. There just have been too many reported problems with the fusion drives Apple uses or for that matter, the home made fusion drives. So yes, the problem you ran into with Boot Camp, in my opinion, was due to the fusion drive setup.

 

[Dieter3]

Bootcamp does work (or can work) properly if you don't mess with the Apple fusion system, but you're stuck with crappy performance, which I just can't tolerate for these particular machines. There MUST be a work around, but maybe not?

I mean, ultimately, YES - I can make them work, and they run VERY well with a high performance SSD in that drive bay. Just a pain in the reared to deal with, waste of time!

So, if a drive or SSD card were to fail on one of these machines, they can be restored, just not a seamlessly as a non-fusion system.

 

[cradom]

Using Bootcamp will continue to waste your OS X partition because: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5431182
I suggest using ReFit to create a bootloader.

 

[Dieter3]

Using Bootcamp will continue to waste your OS X partition because: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5431182
I suggest using ReFit to create a bootloader.

I must be missing something in there, but it all seems to be dedicated to booting Win from an external drive, which I'm not. What'd I miss in there??

Also - forgot to mention - YES, this whole thing could be avoided by simply fusing the 128GB flash with the 240GB SSD and the performance would be awesome.

Problem - I need to run DeepFreeze - not compatible with Apple's fusion system, but otherwise runs perfectly in my current config so long as the drives are not fused.

 

[cradom]

What I was getting at is I don't think you can use Bootcamp on anything other than the boot drive.
In this case I'm considering the other drives as "external" even though technically they're not.

 

[Dieter3]

You can use Bootcamp on any internal drive, it's set up to do it. It'd balk otherwise. It sees all internal drives and let's you choose which one to use and how to partition it - either completely for Windows use or partially, and you chose the size like you would if there was only one drive.