iGuidance and Boot Camp

Just an FYI, after MUCH frustration and web searching and basically no help whatsoever from Navcorp, iGuidance will NOT work on an Intel-based Mac running Boot Camp.

Does Bootcamp support USB connections? Some virtual machine programs do not support USB, notably Microsoft's Virtual PC. A couple of them do say they support USB but not very well, especially if you have to use a driver that's really a USB-to-serial driver that creates virtual COM ports. That can be an exercise in frustration in a virtual environment.

It can be even more frustrating if the virtual environment or the CPU do not support hardware virtualization.

I wish I could be more helpful but I suspect that you and iNav corp. are up against the problems of a virtual environment rather than anything inherently wrong with iGuidance.

When I built my latest computer in January I built a machine that would easily run 64-bit operating systems. I installed Vista Ultimate 64-bit, thinking that I would run Virtual PC or VirtualBox with WinXP installed in it for those applications that gave me headaches in the Vista 64-bit environment. After finding even more headaches trying to get those things to run in either Virtual PC or VirtualBox I wiped the hard drive and installed WinXP 32-bit.

A waste of a perfectly good 64-bit quad-core CPU and half the memory I installed but saved what little hair I have left.

For what it's worth, iGuidance runs rather nicely on my spanky new Acer Aspire One netbook. You might be less frustrated if you just dropped the $329 on one and forgot about the Mac. Shucks, you can hardly buy a decent personal navigation device for that kind of coin.

...ken...

I thought he was using a Bluetooth GPS receiver. It is more likely something to do with virtualizing the hard drive location.

Terry

Sorry I cannot offer a suggestion to solve the problem, but at least I will try to give you a little bit of hope. There are iGuidance users who have successfully run the program on their Mac computers. There is actually a review by Paul K Biba of GpsPasSion Forums linked from our Review page: www.laptopgpsworld.com/reviews -he hasn't tried Boot Camp, but he uses Parallels.

That could result in one of two problems.

1. If his MAC has an internal Bluetooth radio, can Windows running in Bootcamp access the MAC's Bluetooth stack directly? That is, does Bootcamp virtualize the MAC's Bluetooth stack? Probably not.

2. If he has to use a USB dongle for the Bluetooth radio, see my comments about USB issues in virtual machines.

...ken...

There is no virtualization involved in Boot Camp. Boot Camp allows you to run Windows directly on top of the hardware. Despite the branding and the advertisements, the Mac is really a PC inside, and it can run Windows like any other PC.

Boot Camp is a bootloader, a partition manager, and a bunch of drivers to allow Windows to access the hardware. Of course, these drivers must be fully installed for all functions (such as Bluetooth) to work.

okra --- did you get iNav to confirm this? I have been running iGuidance v3 on a Mac Mini for a year and a half and just finally got v4, looking forward to the map and program upgrades. I get the same error -- unable to read hard drive. I'm thinking it must be part of the security process? Looking for a specific hard drive location? Seems to me that's a symptom of a poorly written program. I have installed all kinds of programs on the mini--- I'm using BU-353 USB receiver... not that it even gets that far.

Hi Dave, and welcome to Laptop GPS World.

C:\iNav iGuidance

I'm pretty sure iGuidance will not work unless the folder iNav iGuidance (which contains map data, text-to-speech files, and a few .dat files) is located in C:\. I'm not sure if there is a workaround for this.

Thanks. I was able to get the maploader to copy those files by right clicking and using "run as". It error-ed out on the last file though.... I will double check and manually copy to see if that helps when I get time. Navcorp support just tells me they don't know anything about apple products.... I will continue to push them on this though... there's no reason it shouldn't work just fine.... I have asked for the directory structure, reg entries and what dll's need to be registered.... seems to me that should be about all that's needed.

Dave, I *think* there is no need to use the Maploader application. You should be able to locate iNav iGuidance folder on the installation DVD, and then just copy/paste it to C:\

Well Okra is apparently right. After a few silly emails with Navcorp "support" who steadfastly refuses to help I have to agree that this just won't work. After digging a bit I'm pretty sure it's an issue with a filechck.dll...guessing also that's part of the security/activation process.

Dave,
That's where things seemed to end up with me. I'm pretty sure it's just the way the software is written-it just doesn't like the partition that's created under Boot Camp. I've installed all kinds of other software under Vista on Boot Camp and it's run great. It really stinks because the program seems to have a great interface, but oh well. That's why I ended up with DeLorme-which does run perfectly in Vista on Boot Camp with a BT GPS receiver.

Bummer.
Owen (okra)