Finding out the meaning of beta the hard way

Some users are stuck using Windows on their Mac computers after their tests of Apple's new Boot Camp application messed up their OS X partitions, effectively blocking access to all their OS X data.

"XP installed perfectly, including the enormous number of updates, but it hosed my OS X partition," a user by the name of Garymn wrote on an Apple user forum. "Right now I am installing anew, after whacking the partitions off the disk and reformatting the whole thing."

Apple unveiled Boot Camp last week and the application is currently in beta. The software allows the user to install both Windows and OS X on a system. Each operating system however requires a dedicated hard drive partition, which the application helps setting up.

The software is seen as an attempt by computer maker to court Windows users to switch to Apple hardware by making for a smooth transition.

Apple on the first page of the software's documentation (PDF document) warns that Boot Camp is currently in a testing stage. The company stresses that users should back up their data while using the software and warns against using it in commercial deployments or with important data.

Some users however ignored the warnings and proceeded without making a backup, which lead to some public scoldings.

"You really are barking up the wrong tree," Christian Franz wrote in response to a complaint by one affected tester.

"Just because you expected that an OS-Level beta test would go along without a hitch and forgot to backup your data, this does not constitute an emergency for Apple."

Others couldn't help but see the irony in the fact that an Apple beta locked users into running Windows on their Mac computers.

"Kind of ironic, isn't it [that] Apple [is] giving us a tool that has, at least temporarily, made our Apple hardware capable of ONLY booting into Windows, " tj4shee commented.