Dual Booting OSX and Windows 7 on Apple Hardware

I am a fan of both Apple OSX and Microsoft Windows. As a technology advocate i find myself pushing my limits and getting myself in situations that most people don’t. 

That being said, all Apple computers (that i know of) come with a feature called Boot Camp which is a multi boot utility that allows the partitioning/sizing of an existing OSX to also boot up Windows 7. Its great since it lets you have the best of both worlds, its limitation is that you can only in theory boot to one operating system at a time (true dual-boot).

Now, add VMware Fusion to the mix — Fusion has a feature that will essentially let you import an existing Bootcamp partition and … get ready for this… run BOTH OSX and Windows simultaneously.

Whats even more exciting is that, even after imported and giving you the ability to simultaneously booth booth, you can power off the VM, reboot OSX – boot to Windows and vice versa flawlessly… or so i thought.

what i started seeing was… when Windows 7 booted into its own OS (sand Fusion) it would be activated, but when booting from Fusion it would not be. Eventually i started seeing an activation failed message.

the solution (pretty stupid) is to log into the Windows 7 physical OS, let it activate and shut down, boot into OSX then open Windows 7 from Fusion.

Odd behavior… but it works. Perhaps its because when its Fusion loaded some of the components change (perhaps VMware Fusion presents the hw components differently, which is more likely the case).

 

hope that solves someone a headache but i am certain most of you would have eventually figured it out.