Should you be on the fence about installing OS X Mountain Lion over worry that your Boot Camp installation might be affected, we took the plunge into the great known for you -- and have lived to tell the tale.
With any operating system, users are sure to experience anxiety over whether or not apps and features they depend on might break. While most of OS X Mountain Lion's more than 200 new features have been well documented since the upgrade was first announced back in February, plenty of questions remain.
For users who rely on Boot Camp to make their Mac bend Windows to its will, the question is certainly a valid one -- little has been said about Apple's solution for running Microsoft's operating system on a compatible Mac.
As it turns out, OS X Mountain Lion upgraders have little to fear: Our Boot Camp volume with Windows 7 (64-bit) mounted just the same as it always has, and continued to work just hunky dory even after our OS X Mountain Lion installation.
That also applies to users of Parallels Desktop 7, which the company has been testing extensively with OS X Mountain Lion. You'll need the most recent 7.0.15104.778994 update from July 10 to use it, however -- when our iMac rebooted after installing OS X Mountain Lion, our Parallels icon in the Dock was crossed out and the app refused to launch at all.
Applying the July 10 update got things working again, and we were able to use our Windows 7 Boot Camp installation from Parallels Desktop 7 under OS X Mountain Lion, exactly the same as we previously did using OS X Lion.
And what about new Boot Camp installations? Apple continues to provide the Boot Camp Assistant setup tool in Applications > Utilities, and we experienced no issues when trying to launch and use it under OS X Mountain Lion. (We were offered the option to remove our existing Windows 7 installation or download the latest Windows support software from Apple's servers.)
So there you have it: Nothing to fear from OS X Mountain Lion for Boot Camp users.
Follow this article’s author, J.R. Bookwalter on Twitter
