Understanding How Boot Camp Works


A Windows PC comprises an Intel-compatible processor, some RAM, a hard drive, video and sound interfaces, input/output ports (such as USB and Ethernet), and a bunch of circuitry that ties everything together. This is also a description of your Intel-equipped Macintosh.

When you turn on your Mac, a program stored in special memory chips on the computer's motherboard is executed. This program tells the Mac to look for a hard drive and execute a special application that is stored there. The chips that contain this program are called firmware because they're somewhere between the software that you normally run and the hardware that the computer is built from.

The application that the firmware launches from your hard drive is, of course, your operating system. The operating system itself could be stored in firmware, but it's very difficultand riskyto change the software that's stored in a firmware memory chip. By keeping the operating system stored on your hard drive, you can easily upgrade or replace some or all of the operating system at any time.

This whole process is called booting, which is short for bootstrappinga term that was coined to reflect the fact that the computer is "pulling itself up by its bootstraps" and loading an operating system on the fly rather than executing hard-wired code.

A Windows PC works the same way, but it looks for a Windows operating system instead of the Mac operating system.

When you install Boot Camp, your Mac's firmware is altered. With the new firmware, when you start up your Mac, one of the first things it does is look to see whether the Alt/Option key is being held down. If so, the Mac presents a screen that lets you choose between booting up with the Mac OS or booting up with Windows. Depending on which option you choose, the computer then executes the appropriate code to launch your chosen operating system.

This is an either/or situation. Boot Camp does not let you run Windows applications in the Mac OS; neither does it let you run Mac applications under Windows. Instead, it allows you to configure your Mac as a dual-boot computer. If you want to move data between Windows and Mac applications, you'll have to think about doing it the same way you would move data between a separate Mac and Windows machine. We'll cover this subject on page 43.




Apple Boot Camp Public Beta First Look
Apple Boot Camp Public Beta First Look
ISBN: N/A
EAN: N/A
Year: 2007
Pages: 16

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