By James Hanback. If you have any old Sierra On-line adventures games, you might notice that they tell a good story about the evolution and storage media of computer hardware from 1980 through the end of 1990s. Your humble co-adventurer was able to package his earliest Sierra adventures on a series 5.25-inch floppy drives. You could also buy Sierra games with both 5.25-inch and 3.25-inch disks later in the decade. This was because at one time, computing people had either a 5.25 inch floppy drive or an 3.5-inch drive in their computers. But not always both. Waddaya means “What’s the floppy drive?”
If you had a computer with such a device, most of the games from the late ’90s could also be installed on your internal hard drive. Your humble co-adventurer didn’t have a first PC. The latest Sierra games, which evolved from pixelated animations and Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) music, arrived on CDs. No Sierra game ran faster than one installed on the computer’s own internal hard drive. This was able to access data faster than removable media and didn’t require that you swap media during a scene. An internal hard drive means smoother and quicker play. It is possible to install Microsoft Windows directly on a non-Windows computer’s hard disk instead of using a desktop virtualization tool.
We’ve discussed four ways to virtualize Windows on a Mac or Linux in order to use Boson software in non Windows environments. Virtualization is the best and most convenient way for Boson software to be run in non-Windows environments. However, Windows can be installed on its own hard drive partition to access your computer’s hardware instead of using virtualization software.
Linux users can install an additional OS on their own partition by using a utility such as Gnome Partition Editor(GParted). This will first allow them to partition the hard drive and then install the OS on the new partition. Next, they can configure a boot loader such as GNU’s Not Unix, GNU’s GRand Unified Bootloader, (GRUB), or Microsoft’s NT Boot Loader to allow them to choose the OS to load at startup. Boot Camp Assistant is available for Mac users. It can be found in the Applications > Utilities folder of Mac OS X. This post’s adventure will follow the Mac path. Let’s just say that we have to go back to the beginning and start over.
Basics of Boot Camp
You will need some kind of Windows installation media before you can install Windows directly onto Mac hardware. This could be a CD, DVD or flash drive. You can also use an ISO file to install Windows in a virtual machine (VM) as described in previous blog posts. Boot Camp Assistant cannot be used to install Windows directly from an ISO file. Depending on the version of Bootcamp Assistant you’re using, you may need to first create bootable media from the ISO file. This step can be performed by Boot Camp Assistant on certain versions of Mac OS X and hardware versions. This step can be performed by Apple’s Disk Utility, which is located under the Applications > Utilities folder of Mac OS X. This is how the icon looks like:
Use