Partition Corruption: The End Of The Apple/Microsoft Dual-Boot Experiment?

Never accept a Windows Update invitation when you’re on the other side of the world. That’s the lesson I unfortunately learned yesterday morning (Taiwan time) when, after installing an O/S patch on my MacBook and rebooting as prompted, I found myself no longer able to launch Windows XP on the machine. Attempting boot in Safe Mode indicates that the system locks at the point when Partition Manager (PartMan.Sys) loads, and CHKDSK (I always tote a Windows XP installation CD with me when I travel, for use in situations like this) finds errors but is unable to repair them. My NTFS partition’s mapping is clearly hosed.

Although it’d be easy to point the blame finger at Redmond, I’m not sure that’d be fair. This system’s predecessor, a Dell Inspiron 700m (to which I’ll be returning, at least temporarily) has been rock-solid on Windows XP for the entire many-year span that I’ve owned it. The MacBook, conversely, has long been hit-and-miss under Boot Camp, as any of you who’ve been following my extensive litany of posts already knows. When I found myself unable to launch (or reinstall) two Yahoo-developed programs a few weeks ago, I had a sneaking suspicion that Windows’ life on this laptop was limited. Since then, I’ve had to run Inbox Repair on my Outlook PST file several times, and an O/S boot while at Los Angeles Airport on the way out here came with an error-detected CHKDSK auto-run.

So what’s the root cause of my Windows-on-Mac woes? The O/S? The BIOS? The drivers-and-services suite supplied by Apple? The hardware, either direct from the factory or the Seagate HDD upgrade I did? Some rogue application I installed? A combination of multiple factors? I don’t know, and I’ll ponder my next move on the flights back home tomorrow, but at this point I’m feeling like I’m ready to wrap up the dual-boot experiment and delete the NTFS partition from this system. I’ve learned (and written) a lot, and when the MacBook was stable, it was a great hardware platform on which to run Windows XP. It just wasn’t stable enough, long enough, for my purposes.

Even though Windows XP is DOA, I’m still able to boot OS 10.4 on this machine, and I’m pleasantly surprised by how productive I still am as a result. I can access the NTFS partition in a read-only fashion from OS X, so I’ve copied about 20 GBytes’ worth of files over for preservation purposes. Thanks to the Google Browser Sync add-on, all of my Firefox bookmarks are here, too. I can log onto Gmail from Firefox to monitor my personal email, and via Firefox (and Outlook Web Access) I can also snag my work email. I’m typing this post in the Mac version of Microsoft Office, and I’ve just discovered that EDN’s blog tool (which I’d thought was ActiveX-based) seems to run pretty well in Firefox for OS X, too.

With that said, I probably won’t turn my back on Windows, although I’ve certainly given plenty of thought to doing so over the past 36 hours. Several key browser-based and standalone applications I run require ActiveX support, which not even now-obsolete Internet Explorer for Mac can supply. My 11+ year Outlook archive of emails, contacts, tasks and appointments would be difficult (albeit not impossible) to port to an OS X-based PIM, as would be subsequent syncing of this information with my Windows Smartphone. An Outlook-centric RSS reader is also critical to the workflow I’ve developed. And then there’s the Zune I just started using.

So what should I do, readers? Wipe the NTFS partition clean on this MacBook, reinstall Windows XP, Office 2000 and my other apps, and hope for better stability the next time around? Return to my several-year-older, single-core but stable Dell Inspiron 700m? Invest in a new Windows laptop, such as an XPS M1330? Ditch Windows and completely migrate to OS X? Or ditch both operating systems and giv Linux a try? Impermanence willing, I’ll be home in less than 48 hours, and I look forward to reviewing your accumulated suggestions then.