MacBook Air Portable Genius, 4th Edition

Creating a Partition for Windows

With your MacBook Air all ready for action, it’s time to let Boot Camp do its thing. This is a two-stage process:

Use Boot Camp Assistant to create a partition for Windows. This is the subject of this section.

Install Windows into the new partition. I get to that a bit later.

Understanding partitions

When you install an operating system such as OS X or Windows on a hard drive, the operating system reserves the hard drive for its own use. The OS is quite adamant about this, too, and it won’t let you install another operating system on the same hard drive. If you force another OS on that drive, you’ll only trash the original system. This is all quite sensible when you think about it because different operating systems have different ways of organizing files on the hard drive, so letting two different systems access the same drive is just a recipe for chaos and disaster.

All is not lost for would-be dual-booters, however. You may not be able to install two different operating systems on a single hard drive, but you can divide a single hard drive into two sections. These sections are called partitions, and the key thing for you is that each partition looks, acts, and responds just as if it was an entire hard drive on its own.

You’ll also often see ...