iMac Windows 7 64-bit install question

[FredW]

Hi everyone,

I'm trying to install Windows 7 64-bit on my Early 2009 iMac (3.06, 4gb, ATi), and thus far the installation has gone well--I'm writing this from IE8, and things are fine.

However, this is the third Windows 7 installation I've done today (tried 64-bit first, then 32-bit, and now 64-bit again). The problems begin once I try to install the Boot Camp drivers. I get a keyagent/mac HAL error, and then Windows starts blue screening and doing system restores on reboot.

Can anyone suggest to me how I should proceed from this point? I know that the iMac doesn't officially support 64-bit Windows, but I also know that it can and that there are people who have made 64-bit Windows 7 work on an iMac.

Thanks for any and all assistance,

Ben

 

[rgarjr]

I have W7 64 on my iMac. What I did was just ran that bootcamp64 file and it installed several drivers and it did give me the 2 errors HAL something. I just ignored it and that was it. Windows launches fine and the bootcamp manager starts up and all.

 

[fhall1]

Sorry....i put this reply in a couple other threads before I saw this one that seems to be exactly what I saw...

I tried for 4 hours yesterday to get Win7 RTM x64 installed on my iMac, but had problems and needed to blow away my initial BootCamp and re-install the 32 bit version.

Biggest issues were that the MacHAL and KeyAgent drivers weren't signed, so 64 bit won't let them install. I hit "ignore" and got errors that the services wouldn't start. This meant Bootcamp control panel wouldn't let me select which drive I wanted to boot with, meaning I couldn't boot back into OS X. I had to boot to the leopard DVD and use the utilities menu to get back to the OS X boot drive.

I'd love to have the 64 bit version working but after much time Googling I couldn't find any workable solutions, so I reverted back to the 32 bit version which installed without a hitch - except sound level is low...still trying to solve that one, but I spent enough time "playing" with Win7 yesterday and needed to do some other things.

 

[Chris Welch]

The Boot Camp drivers that came with your iMac Leopard disc are too old. You need to download the latest Boot Camp drivers that came out with recent machines. You can find just the Boot Camp portion on certain torrent sites.

 

[younker]

you can wait the latest bootcamp driver for Windows 7 from SL image.

Works perfect with Windows 7

 

[Infrared]

The Boot Camp drivers that came with your iMac Leopard disc are too old. You need to download the latest Boot Camp drivers that came out with recent machines. You can find just the Boot Camp portion on certain torrent sites.

Also, some of the Boot Camp drivers probably aren't necessary.

For example:

Apple's keystroke grabbing driver is known to cause issues*, so
I'd avoid that anyway. The functionality is accessible by other
methods.

Brightness can be controlled in the ATI or NVidia control panel,
depending on which variety of card you have. For an aluminum
keyboard, this registry tweak will map the keys F13-F15 to the
volume controls and F19 to Print Screen:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Keyboard Layout]
"Scancode Map"=hex:00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,05,00,00,00, 20,e0,66,00, 2e,e0,65,00, 30,e0,64,00, 37,e0,6a,00, 00,00,00,00

Finally, DVDs and CDs can be ejected from Windows explorer.

*http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=9873807