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slick316

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Sep 28, 2005
377
28
I read on some other forums that MS is releasing a public beta next week, kind of has me intrigued.

I know there are Beta builds of Vista floating around, just wondering if anyone has tried it yet on an Intel Mac?
 

clayj

macrumors 604
Jan 14, 2005
7,648
1,384
visiting from downstream
slick316 said:
I read on some other forums that MS is releasing a public beta next week, kind of has me intrigued.

I know there are Beta builds of Vista floating around, just wondering if anyone has tried it yet on an Intel Mac?
Boot Camp isn't compatible with Vista (or vice versa), and from what I've read, the only way to run Vista on an Intel-based Mac right now is to zap your Mac OS X partition.
 

jonmf76

macrumors newbie
May 24, 2006
19
0
clayj,

what does that mean to zap OS X partition? Does that mean completely remove it? or re-install Windows?
 

mkrishnan

Moderator emeritus
Jan 9, 2004
29,776
15
Grand Rapids, MI, USA
*I don't own an Intel Mac warning*

I'm pretty sure I've seen people posting that they have done this. I think the trick is this:

Once you install the firmware change, you can boot of an MBR of another partition. You can install and run anything you want in that other partition, as long as you have drivers for your hardware for it.

Look up a guideline for dual or triple-booting Linux with OS X (or OS X and WinXP). The same deal applies to Vista. Alternatively, you should be able to install XP and then upgrade that partition (which boots just like a PC) to Vista....

EDIT: Here you go: Tiger/Vista/XP triple-boot, working solution:

http://forum.osx86project.org/index.php?showtopic=15225
 

macsrockmysocks

macrumors regular
Feb 21, 2006
233
0
I have aplied to get a Windows Vista Beta verison, but I have not gotten it in like 3 days. Has anyone else tried to get it and actually got it?
 

adam1185

macrumors regular
Apr 30, 2004
217
0
Installing Vista works fine without erasing your OS X partition. Here are some instructions I used that worked perfectly.

"1) Boot to the Vista DVD.
2) When I got to the "Choose a drive to install to" page, pressed "advanced" (or "more drive info" or whatever it's called).
3) Selected the first partition (200MB unknown partition), this was the EFI partition.
4) Pressed "delete."
5) Selected the Windows partition to install to.


From there Vista took about an hour to install on my build. After the first reboot it came back with a "Could not find Winload.exe" error.

To fix that, I booted to the DVD again and selected "recovery options" - it said "Your startup information is invalid, click Repair And Restart to fix it".

On the next reboot it worked fine."

Taken from this thread: http://forum.osx86project.org/index.php?showtopic=14448&st=40

NOTE: The Boot Camp drivers CD will not install properly so the wireless networking won't work out of the box. The regular ethernet driver works straight out of the box with Vista as well as the graphics driver, sound, bluetooth. You need to extract the drivers manually from the setup.exe in the boot camp disk to get the wireless networking driver, brightness control and CDEject.exe or whatever it's called. The startup control panel will also need to be installed manually. At least that is the case for the iMacs.

Note #2: Deleting that EFI partition will make it so you can't erase the windows partition from withing the boot camp app in OS X. You would need to restore the EFI partition manually if you wanted to do that.
 

clayj

macrumors 604
Jan 14, 2005
7,648
1,384
visiting from downstream
Adam, I saw that post earlier today.

It looks like you can get it to work, but there's a lot of finagling required, and you're left with no EFI partition... which, as I understand it, could cause problems booting OS X *and* could prevent you from using Boot Camp to remove the Windows partition.

I think I may wait a while before I try installing Vista on my MBP... although I could try it on my Intel-based Mac mini since there's no vital data or work being done there.
 

adam1185

macrumors regular
Apr 30, 2004
217
0
clayj said:
Adam, I saw that post earlier today.

It looks like you can get it to work, but there's a lot of finagling required, and you're left with no EFI partition... which, as I understand it, could cause problems booting OS X *and* could prevent you from using Boot Camp to remove the Windows partition.

I think I may wait a while before I try installing Vista on my MBP... although I could try it on my Intel-based Mac mini since there's no vital data or work being done there.

Well I followed those instructions last night on my iMac and now Vista works fine and OS X works fine. There were some instructions in that thread to manually reinstate the EFI partition if you wanted to get rid of boot camp. But of course, everyone should make sure OS X is backed up properly before even attempting this.
 

mudger

macrumors member
Oct 23, 2005
36
0
Is there any way you can use an EXTERNAL HD to boot Vista from? I would prefer not to have windows on my spankin new imac but I wouldn't mind if it was booted externally.
 

atmenterprises

macrumors 6502
Jan 28, 2006
389
204
I installed it through Parallels and it worked fine - plus, no messy partitions. Just delete the hard drive image if you want to get rid of it.
 

mkrishnan

Moderator emeritus
Jan 9, 2004
29,776
15
Grand Rapids, MI, USA
So thats a YES, you can boot from an external HD?

Parallels is different from Bootcamp. In Parallels, the Windows environment runs out of a disk image file that's located within your Mac disk environment. The file can go anywhere you want... it can be located on any disk of any kind that is adequately big to hold it (it'll obviously be several gigabytes in size...). But that's Parallels -- not Bootcamp.
 
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