Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Boot Camp Flaw Leaves Some Users Fuming

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the oh-teh-irony dept.

Karl Cocknozzle writes "Some users who chose to install Apple's recent beta-offering of Boot Camp without basic precautions (like a full backup) have found themselves unable to boot their Macs to OS X. In a discussion thread on Apple's technical support Web site, more than a dozen users reported that Boot Camp successfully partitioned their hard drive and allowed them to install a working version of Windows, but then would no longer allow them to switch back. The download-agreement page for Boot Camp contains the explicit warning that Boot Camp is still 'Beta' software, and would not be supported if problems arose. On the whole, it sounds like the number of affected users is quite small, but may reflect a common lack of knowledge of what a 'beta' release really is: Not ready for prime-time."

6 of 391 comments (clear)

  1. news? by npietraniec · · Score: 0, Redundant

    All this excitement may to have led some users to install Boot Camp without taking many precautions, ignoring the fact that the software is a "beta" product, and that Apple said at the beginning it wouldn't offer technical support.

    I guess they learned their lesson in a similar way most people learn that backups are important - by being caught without them. Shame on them for using a BETA PARTITION TOOL without doing backups.

    Is this really news?

  2. Read the big bold print by Pao|o · · Score: 0, Redundant

    There's a reason why they call it BETA. Some people are just so stupid.

  3. Re:And this make the news? by Zenzilla · · Score: 1, Redundant

    back when I took software engineering the definition I was given for beta was: has major bugs but will not lose user data.

    Sounds to me like boot camp is still in alpha.....

  4. Re:And this make the news? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Redundant

    "I mean seriously - when has dual booting with Windows "ever" worked out of the box?"

    I've been dual-booting win2k and linux for years now, so I'll go ahead and say "at least 2 years."

  5. Re:And this make the news? by bigbadunix · · Score: 0, Redundant



    The problem is...this -isn't- interesting. It's a a small faction of non-techical people who didn't read (and print out, as apple suggested...multiple times) the instructions. I experienced zero problems with BootCamp, but I followed the directions explicitly. In following the directions, I also backed up my data, knew that stuff might break, and knew that I'd have nobody but myself to blame for any problems with may have arisen. How many of these people actually followed the partitioning directions (use what was marked as C:), or to use a slipstreamed SP2 disc, or any of the other -very- specific instructions that Apple provided? I don't see anyone complaining about blowing anything up with XPoM, is that somehow different??

    Blame Google for mis-use of the word "Beta"? Hardly. Blame the OSS movement in general...how many admins are running beta versions of my MySQL, PostgreSQL, mplayer, ffmpeg, ... ? Should Apple perhaps have put a shiny red exclamation point all over the dmg (unnecessarily)? Maybe, but at the root of the problem is the fact that nobody reads any documentation any more, and then they go crying to the message boards, which then gets picked up by the trashy (internet) media which uses the (mis)facts as a platform for spouting off anti-[whomever] rhetoric.

    Okay, I can breathe now. And so can you.

    --

    The older I get, the less I like everyone else.
  6. Re:And this make the news? by reast · · Score: 0, Redundant

    First intel chips, now windows. What's the point of buying an apple. It's like ordering a steak and dipping it in sh@#.