Vista on Mac Pro no boot camp?

[janthenat]

I'm trying to install Vista on my Mac Pro without using boot camp. Is this possible? The reason I'm trying to do this is that I need to have 3 partitions on my drive. I can't find a way to use boot camp assistant to create more than 2 partitions.

I booted to the Tiger install CD and used Disk Utility to create my 3 partitions, 2 HFS+ and 1 Fat32. The actual install problem I'm having is that the Vista install can't find any drives or see the Fat32 partition I've created.

Any ideas?

 

[shoe11]

I'm trying to install Vista on my Mac Pro without using boot camp. Is this possible? The reason I'm trying to do this is that I need to have 3 partitions on my drive. I can't find a way to use boot camp assistant to create more than 2 partitions.

I booted to the Tiger install CD and used Disk Utility to create my 3 partitions, 2 HFS+ and 1 Fat32. The actual install problem I'm having is that the Vista install can't find any drives or see the Fat32 partition I've created.

Any ideas?

Vista requires NTFS and yes it is possible to install Vista without using Boot Camp.

~shoe

 

[janthenat]

Vista requires NTFS and yes it is possible to install Vista without using Boot Camp.

~shoe

I presumed it could be installed without Boot Camp, which is why I went ahead and tried it. Here's the wierd thing... while booted to the Vista installer DVD, I can open a command prompt and format the "c:\" drive, which I did (I reformatted it as NTFS). Still, though, the installer does not see the partition.

Is there an issue with where the partition is on the drive (beginning or end)? Should I clear out the partition and leave it as free space? I get the same installation error using the 32 and 64 bit versions, by the way.

 

[shoe11]

I presumed it could be installed without Boot Camp, which is why I went ahead and tried it. Here's the wierd thing... while booted to the Vista installer DVD, I can open a command prompt and format the "c:\" drive, which I did (I reformatted it as NTFS). Still, though, the installer does not see the partition.

Is there an issue with where the partition is on the drive (beginning or end)? Should I clear out the partition and leave it as free space? I get the same installation error using the 32 and 64 bit versions, by the way.

I installed the Vista Ultimate 64-bit full version on my Mac Pro which has 2GB of RAM and the 7300GT card. My Raptor X was in the first bay. I booted the machine with the Mac OS X install disc and used Disk Utility to delete all partitions and recreated the drive as an MS-DOS (FAT-32) partition. From there I restarted and booted with the Vista install disc. The Vista installer can't use the FAT32 partition that Disk Utility creates, but it allows you to delete the partition, recreate it, and then format it with NTFS. Worked with no problems for me. As I mentioned in another post you may also need to reset the boot record to MBR and this can be done by Disk Utility as well.

HTH

~shoe

 

[htdefiant]

I'm trying to install Vista on my Mac Pro without using boot camp. Is this possible? The reason I'm trying to do this is that I need to have 3 partitions on my drive. I can't find a way to use boot camp assistant to create more than 2 partitions.

I booted to the Tiger install CD and used Disk Utility to create my 3 partitions, 2 HFS+ and 1 Fat32. The actual install problem I'm having is that the Vista install can't find any drives or see the Fat32 partition I've created.

Any ideas?

I think you could apply this
to your method. Just change the code to apply to HFS+...

 

[dgdosen]

Isn't this sacrilege?

I'm running Vista on my MacBook Pro, and it is awesome!

Can I apply the same principals on the MacBook Pro as the Mac Pro? To me, the best option is Mac hardware and the Vista OS

 

[twoodcc]

I'm running Vista on my MacBook Pro, and it is awesome!

Can I apply the same principals on the MacBook Pro as the Mac Pro? To me, the best option is Mac hardware and the Vista OS

all i know is that i'm having tons of trouble trying to get it on my mac pro. i can't even get xp on it and i'm losing more sleep every night

 

[dgdosen]

all i know is that i'm having tons of trouble trying to get it on my mac pro. i can't even get xp on it and i'm losing more sleep every night

Easy as pie for me... You'll have to fill me in on how/why this is so complicated...

 

[twoodcc]

Easy as pie for me... You'll have to fill me in on how/why this is so complicated...

just look at my thread....it's just a few down from this one....created by me

 

[janthenat]

OK, so I was finally able to get Vista Enterprise (32) installed on my Mac Pro. However, I had to install XP first, which had no problem recognizing the NTFS partition I had created. So, installed XP, then ran the Vista installer while booted to XP and installed a new Vista placing the old XP in a folder called Windows.old on the same partition.

Installation went fine doing it this way. I'm unable to get my X1900 video working though. Could this be the "less than 2GB RAM" problem? I only have 1GB. I've manually extracted the XP drivers for Macintosh, but no luck with video there. When I try to run the ATI installer, I get an error and it quits.

 

[janthenat]

In case anyone is interested, below is the error I get when trying to run the Vista Enterprise (32 or 64) install when booted from the DVD. This error shows up in front of the "Where do you want to install Windows?" part of the install, where it should be showing the available drives/partitions...

"Windows installation encountered an unexpected error. Verify
that the installation sources are accessible, and restart the
installation.

Error code: 0xE0000100"

Behind this error dialog, I can see this message below the box where the drives/partitions should be... "No drives were found. Click Load Driver to provide a mass storage driver for installation." This seems strange because when booted to the XP install CD there are no problems seeing the available drives/partitions.

Any idea what this might mean? The DVD was burned from the ISO and works fine to install on any standard PC around here. What gives? Is there something up with my Mac Pro?

Thanks