To begin with, I tried using Apple’s Boot Camp Assistant to split my hard disk into my regular partition for OS X and a 25 gigabyte windows partition. I had done this without issue before when dual booting with Windows XP (I’ve never owned a machine running Vista). However this time it failed. Boot Camp told me sternly that I could not create the partition because there were ‘files which could not be moved’. This basically meant that there was not enough contiguous free space on my drive to create the large partition I requested, and the files were too large to be moved. This occurs because OS X automatically defragments your hard drive unless it encounters files larger than 20 mb. So over the course of one and a half years of use, my computer’s drive became too fragmented to partition.

I could have purchased the program ‘iDefrag‘ in order to fix this issue, as it defragments files over the 20 mb size limit, but that would have cost me money. Instead I inserted my OS X Leopard DVD and restarted the computer. The DVD automatically mounts at startup. I then restored my whole hard disk from my most recent Time Machine backup by clicking on ‘Time Machine’ in the Utilities menu of the top bar. I let the data restore overnight. The purpose of this is to rewrite the data contiguously so that Boot Camp Assistant can then create the partitions.

Having made the partitions, I inserted a previously burned Windows 7 DVD and restarted. (You can get the .ISO from Microsoft for a limited time, and you can burn it with Disk Utitlity).

When the Windows installer ran, it told me that it could not write to the partition I had created because it was not NTFS formatted. I tried many ways of working around this, including downloading and using GParted, a partitioning Linux distro. That was wrong. Eventually I found out that when a non-writable disk is selected in the partition window in the Windows 7 installer, there is an advanced link one can click to then chose to format the partition. I eventually did that. And after that, the installation went well.

I ran Windows 7 and installed the Windows-Mac drivers located on the Leopard install disk. But sound was not working. I did more research.

In order to make sound work in Windows 7 on a Mac, you must install the sound drivers from the Leopard disk in Windows Vista compatibility mode. To do this, right click on the DVD icon in the ‘Computer’ (access via start menu) window and click ‘Open’. Then navigate to the ‘Drivers’ folder. Right Click on ‘RealTek Setup’ and chose ‘Troubleshoot Compatibility’.Go through the various pages clicking the options saying that the drivers worked in Vista.

If you have VMware Fusion installed on your Mac, you can now run Windows 7 in it. It will find your Boot Camp partition itself. Lastly, if you can not make internet access work in Windows 7 in VMware Fusion, you may be able to make it work by following the instructions posted on the VMware forum. You might also want to check that it isnt your firewall blocking VMware Fusion. Perhaps you are a dirty Pirate who attempted to prevent VMware calling home by using Little Snitch?