Removing and re-installing bootcamp...damage hard drive?
Hi.
A few days after I got my Macbook, I installed Bootcamp and Windows XP Home on it. After realizing i didn't have much use for it, at the time, I removed the partition using the Bootcamp assistant. I recently re-installed Bootcamp on my Macbook, to try out some of the features again. Today I installed a program called VMware Fusion Beta, which is a virtual machine similar to Parallels. I figured, "Hey, it's free, it uses the already installed Bootcamp partition, what do I have to lose?" Well, it turns out that the VMware Fusion removed the Bootcamp partition itself, and moved it to it's system files, so now I can no longer boot with Windows XP.
The icing on the cake is that my product key for Windows XP came with another computer I had purchased, and much to my amazment, it worked when I installed through Bootcamp. Beacuse VMware Fusion allocates a certain amount of RAM, Windows is detecting a major hardware change and requesting that I reinstall. However, my product key no longer works, as Windows is saying that my product key has been used too many times already.
My question is this: If I were to uninstall VMware Fusion and re-partition my hard drive with Bootcamp, will my product key likely work again?
But moreso: Does repeatedly partitioning your hard drive and erasing and repartitioning do any serious long-term damage to the drive? I know with Windows that would create fragments, but I have heard that fragmentation is a non-issue with Macs.
Any thoughts on this?
Thanks very much in advance,
Jason
"But moreso: Does repeatedly partitioning your hard drive and erasing and repartitioning do any serious long-term damage to the drive? I know with Windows that would create fragments, but I have heard that fragmentation is a non-issue with Macs."
Actually... erasing and repartitioning your hard drive (with Windows or otherwise) gets rid of any fragmentation you may have. Fragmentation is a result of the way the filesystem on the computer works. I won't go in to much detail... but for various reasons, bits and pieces of files can end up being spread all over your hard drive. When this happens, in order to read those files, your hard drive head has to skip all around to pick up the little bits instead of having them in one nice place. All that extra jumping around can add up to lots of time on a very fragmented drive. The more deleting and writing of files you do, you more fragmentation you get. So, in effect, when you partition a drive you are wiping all of the data and starting fresh. Partitioning your drive and erasing and repartitioning is basically just writing data to your drive. In fact, if you do a quick format in Windows, it doesn't even do all that much writing... it just tells the system that the data in that space can be overwritten. So... to cut an already long story short, you won't hurt your drive. You're only having it do what it will literally do billions of times in it's lifetime... just read and write.
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