I installed windows on my mac and can’t figure out how to switch back to Mac. On a black screen when I restart it gives me three options as to what OS I want, all the options are Windows XP. Did I partition it incorrectly? Or is there some way to switch?
I did that just now, the option thing, and all it gave me is a picture of a hard disk with "Windows" under it.
September 8th, 2010 on 3:46 pm
Start up your Mac and when you hear the chime, push the ‘Option’ button and hold it till you get to the Mac boot screen.
***EDIT***
Ya thats the Mac boot screen, you must of deleted OsX.
September 8th, 2010 on 3:46 pm
Your Questions:
Q1: "Did I partition it correctly?" Maybe. Did you use Boot Camp to make the partition? It should have made a 32GB partition for Windows, unless you moved the slider bar. If you did something really dangerous such as move the slider bar to exactly the center, you would have two partitions that are exactly the same size. That would mean you would need to think of another way to identify the target for your Windows installation while booted to the XP CD. For example, if the real value size of your internal HDD is about 114GB (for a drive sold as "120GB"), you would by default have a 32GB Windows partition and an 82GB "Boot Camp" partition. Some Windows installers do not show partition names. Be prepared to identify the target partition by format. You should see the two partitions, but one is listed as "not formatted" or "free space" or whatever Windows is calling Mac format this week. The other should be listed as either FAT-32 or NTFS, depending on what you chose for the format in Boot Camp. Now here’s a real clunker for you: Boot Camp will not give you any format choice for a new partition that is larger than 32GB. Like the older versions of Windows format utilities, it cannot format a FAT-32 volume larger than 32GB. Whether Boot Camp formats a larger volume as NTFS (I doubt it) or simply leaves it as Mac format, I don’t know, but since it doesn’t take a lot of time after that stage, I suspect the latter. I found that the Windows CD did not call the larger partition that I created "NFTS format", so I had to format using the Windows 7 CD… and then you have to be really careful that you choose the correct one. In this case, you should be able to identify it by size as well as format. When in doubt, go woith format. No FAT or NTFS partition has OS X installed.
Q2: "Is there some way to switch?" Well, there is if you have something to switch to. First step is put the OS X DVD in and wait. After 15-20 seconds, Windows should launch the Boot Camp drivers installer. Install all that and then you will have an item at Start > Control Panels called "Boot Camp". Open it and you can choose between Windows and OS X… unless you don’t have OS X.
The option key is typically used only when you have shut down or just clicked restart, and you definitely want to change the startup choice at next boot. If you are booted to OS X, use the Startup Disk pane of System Preferences. If you are booted to Windows, use the Boot Camp control panel. If you installed a different NTFS driver, such as "NTFS For Mac", use the NTFS For Mac pane of System Preferences to change to Windows startup. If you install NTFS-3G driver, you have no software for choosing Windows startup, so you must use the option key method.