Use Boot Camp Windows installation without rebooting

Apr 01, '09 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: robg

A couple years ago, when the Intel transition was just beginning, Apple introduced Boot Camp. Probably you've heard of it -- Boot Camp lets you boot your Mac natively into Windows, with full driver support for all hardware. Really, if you need the best Windows performance from your Mac, Boot Camp tops all the virtualization applications. I, however, hate running Boot Camp, because it requires a reboot. Looking for a way around this problem -- I wanted the power of Boot Camp without a reboot -- I dug deep into the guts of OS X, going crazy with strings - in Terminal on a slew of binary files.

Finally, after much digging, I found a solution! Of course, you're probably thinking, "that's impossible!" Often, though, what seems impossible isn't, and such is the case here. Look, I didn't believe it myself until I tried it and it worked. So let's get started...

Fire up Terminal, enter this command, and press Return when done:

defaults write com.apple.StarTrek BootCampLive -bool true
That's it, you're done with the hard part (Star Trek was the code name of an old Apple project that involved porting the Mac OS to run on Intel-powered machines; Apple's engineers have apparently repurposed this word!).

Now, in the Finder, navigate to your Boot Camp partition (assuming Windows XP Pro, which is what I use), then drill down into Windows » System32, and double-click on bootcfg.exe. With the command above in place -- which creates a special file in your user's Preferences folder -- the bootcfg.exe file will launch, and soon enough, you'll see Windows booting in a window of its own!

What you see is real -- it's the full Boot Camp Windows installation booting directly on top of OS X, but not as an application. Instead, it's more like one of those TV tuner cards that puts an overlay on your screen. You won't be able to take screenshots, copy and paste into or out of the Windows window, or drag and drop to/from the window. (If you hold down Command and Option, you can resize and move the window, and you'll see the Boot Camp identifier, as seen in the photo at right -- sorry for the quality, but I had to use my digital camera to capture it). But everything else works! Hardware mounts natively, my iSight worked (it would disable itself in iChat, for instance, if I activated it in a Windows chat client), and even my Wacom tablet worked. Flight Sim X ran with excellent frame rates, too.

When you're done, just shut down Windows as normal, and the overlay window will vanish.

Note that this is very experimental, and you may experience system instability -- I had one full lockup while testing, so please, proceed at your own risk and make sure you're backup is current! If you've tried this trick, and you're not happy with the results, you can just delete the com.appleStarTrek file that you'll find in your user's Library » Preferences folder, and all will be back to normal.

[robg adds: For those reading this hint at some point in the future, the above was an April Fool's Day entry from April 1st, 2009. I have marked the giveaway characters in the first two paragraphs to make it bit more obvious, and this note to completely reveal the ruse to unsuspecting future readers.]

Comments (21)


Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20090331224435492