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Using Boot Camp to Create a New Partition

Once you have launched Boot Camp Assistant and made sure you have the additional software you need (such as Windows drivers for your Mac hardware), you will get to the screen that asks you to partition your Mac hard disk to carve out a Windows partition, as shown in Figure 1 below.

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Figure 1: Carve a Windows partition with Boot Camp Assistant

By default, you may be asked to create a partition as small as 20 GB — that’s far too less for any practical use. Use as much space as you can spare — yet do not get tempted to use the Divide Equally option if you have a very large hard disk. As you can see in Figure 2 below, I decided to carve a 200GB Windows partition. Click the Partition button to proceed.

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Figure 2: Carve a Windows partition with Boot Camp Assistant

Boot Camp Assistant will now partition your hard disk, as shown in Figure 3 below.

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Figure 3: Partition being created

Once the partitioning is done, note that your Mac OS X desktop will show a new hard disk partition called BOOTCAMP, as shown in Figure 4.

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Figure 4: New partition displayed

Boot Camp Assistant will prompt you to insert your Windows installation disc, as shown in Figure 5.

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Figure 5: Insert your Windows install disc

Insert your Windows install disc, and click the Start Installation button. In the next post in this series, you will learn what happens next.

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