-
Thanks.
Good point about formatting. What a ball ache this becomes.
Maybe I'll just replace the old HD in the disc draw with a 250g SSD. That should be enough to run windows and all the software fine. That way they're on different drives completely.
Seems simpler and cleaner option that partitioning 1 hard drive with 2 different formats.
skinny-
If you run a VM from an SSD, you shouldn't suffer performance wise. It's pretty slick these days.
-
It becomes even more of a ball ache I'm afraid. Since 10.9.2 it turns out Apple broke the way I linked to of manually enabling NTFS write access. I just tried it and I couldn't remount the drive until I'd taken out the additional string in the fstab file. There are ways of getting write access another way but they involved third party drivers and YMMV.
I'd recommend separate drives over two partitions. I used to run my Windows/Mac OS on two partitions, but the problem is that Windows is an antisocial wotsit and when you install big updates it will fuck about with the Master Boot Record (MBR) and the next thing you know you can't boot into anything but Windows (OSX never does this). Also some Windows updates wouldn't install when Windows was on a partition because it expected Windows to have the primary boot record (when if you're using the Chameleon bootloader like I am that lives on the Mac OS disk, you need the Mac OS disk to have the primary bootloader).
I actually had an issue once after installing Windows on a physically separate disk when it STILL managed to fuck up the MBR on the other disk. I still think this should have been physically impossible, but it happened. So now when I do a new Windows install I tend to unplug my Mac OS system drive out of (arguably justified) paranoia.
I don't know anything about virtual machines but two drives or a fast VM set up seem like the best options.
IT JUST WORKS*!
Well_is_it
Fox
You can't run more than one OS at the same time, as they've said ^.
OSX does save your windows though so when you go back into it everything should be as you left it. If you haven't saved your work it will prompt you.
I discovered the other day that even written but unposted forum posts survive a restart :)
To access documents on the mac to edit from Windows, you'd need to make sure the drive in question was NTFS format, not Mac OS format.
You'd also need to manually enable NTFS write access if you wanted to put files on that drive from your Mac, as stupidly Apple gave OSX the ability to write to NTFS drives but left it turned off by default.
Edit: LINK REMOVED