Parallels 5 Macbook pro + Bootcamp

Hi Everyone,

please go easy on me as I am a Mac newbie! I have a 13" Macbook Pro and I have installed Parallels 5 and Windows 7 64bit onto it.

My question is when I go to "Computer" whilst in Windows mode the "C" drive is now named "Bootcamp" and is approx 60GB, is this normal?

The reason I ask is that I thought Bootcamp was if you used the Macbook to either boot as a mac or windows machine at startup?

I have not got much experience with macs, although I wanted Parallels so I could switch OS's without shutting down. It appears to be working ok, but I am puzzled by the "Bootcamp" labelling.

Any advice on this would be greatly appreciated,

SDM197.

 

Boot Camp can mean a lot of things:

1) There's "Boot Camp Assistant.app" which creates a new partition on your hard disk and boots from the Windows installation CD so you can install Windows to the new partition.

2) The new partition or any partition that contains Windows or Linux is called a Boot Camp partition.

3) In Parallels Desktop, when you add a hard disk to a virtual machine, you can use the Boot Camp option instead of the virtual hard disk option to use partitions on a real physical disk.

4) There's the Boot Camp drivers which are located on the Mac OS X installer DVD and which you can install when you insert the DVD while Windows is running.

5) The Boot Camp drivers install a Boot Camp control panel so Windows can set the startup disk and other Mac hardware specific stuff.

Did you install Windows 7 to a Boot Camp partition or to a Parallels Desktop virtual hard disk? What is the name of your virtual machine? If your virtual machine is called "BootCamp" (which I think is the default name of virtual machines created from a Boot Camp installation), then when you log into Windows while running the virtual machine, the Windows disk in the Finder will be called "[C] BootCamp" where C is the drive letter in the virtual machine and BootCamp is the name of the virtual machine.

Note, in Windows, a disk can have both a drive letter and a name. The name of a disk in Windows does not affect the name of the disk that Parallels shows in the Finder. When you shutdown the virtual machine, Parallels will unmount it's "[C] BootCamp" volume and remount the Windows disk in the Finder.

 

Hi,

Thanks for the reply, I did not use Bootcamp I just followed the instructions on Parallels for a typical Windows installation which I think would then be classed as virtual machine. My Macbook then could not find the network card on Windows so I installed Parallels tools and now it works.

It was just that the drive was labelled bootcamp and it puzzled me as to why.

SDM197.