Today I installed Windows 7 on a MacBook 13″ Aluminum in order to do .NET development with Visual Studio as my Virtual Machine was getting slow. The experience was painful, first because I had to free a lot of space from my hard drive and second because Boot Camp 3.x x64 is not officially supported in my Mac.
I wanted a Windows partition with a size around 50GB so I had to free some space on my hard drive. After I got 70GB free I decided to start the Boot Camp assistant and to my surprise I couldn’t make it complete the first time due to an error: “Files cannot be moved…”. The only solution recommended by Apple was to backup everything and reinstall OSX and I was not happy so I decided to google for an answer until I found two that worked:
- Free more space, I got 100GB free.
- Defragment the hard disk with iDefrag
I tried the first one and it didn’t work until I did a quick (online) defrag with iDefrag.
After doing both steps I was able to create the new partition and install Windows 7 x64 and when I tried to install the Boot Camp drivers and utilities in Windows 7 I got another error saying that my MacBook wasn’t supported with any 64bits version, WTF? I had to run the BootCamp64.msi manually as Administrator from my Snow Leopard DVD and in order to update it I had to first decompress the BootCamp 3.1 Update and do the same with it.
Now everything is running fine even though my MacBook is “unsupported”.