Vista Pre-RC1 on Mac Pro

[patseguin]

I have Vista up and running on my Mac Pro. The hard drive is running in DMA mode! I already had XP running via Boot Camp and just did an upgrade. It took pretty long and there were a couple of hitches but it is working. I had one reboot where it just went back to XP like nothing ever happened so I restarted the install. It went pretty far then I had a blue screen. It continued installing and took forever on the "completing install" phase. First thing I did was check all the IDE channels and ALL show DMA mode. In device manager, there is no driver for "Base System Device" and I couldn't get one to install from my Mac drivers CD. There is also an "Unknown Device" right below it. All seems to work fine though.

It also shows 4 CPU's where XP (Home) only showed 2.

 

[georgi0]

I have Vista up and running on my Mac Pro. .

good luck,
how's the performance? can you actually work with it?

 

[amin]

That is great news. My Mac Pro is duue to arrive today, and I am going to try this also. Anyone have any advice as to whether I should install Vista straight away or install XP first, then Vista over it? I figure it makes more sense to try the former first.

 

[patseguin]

Well, it definitely seems to have it's problems. I just tried restarting Windows and got a Blue Screen with a memory dump. I powered down and rebooted to Mac OS X and wondered why I was even bothering with Windows.

 

[amin]

Will the stock Mac Pro graphics card support Aero Glass? I don't care much, since I will rarely use Windows and plan on upgrading the graphics card anyway, but I am curious.

 

[Shadow]

Well since the GMA950 does, I'd say it does.

 

[amin]

Well since the GMA950 does, I'd say it does.

Where did you read that the GMA950 does?

EDIT - I googled and found references to back up your statement. Thanks.

 

[patseguin]

Will the stock Mac Pro graphics card support Aero Glass? I don't care much, since I will rarely use Windows and plan on upgrading the graphics card anyway, but I am curious.

Yes it runs Aero Glass perfectly. In fact, I am quite impressed with how polished Vista looks. I don't think there are proper drivers yet for the Mac Pro, but once Boot Camp is final I think we can really have the best of both worlds. I mainly want Windows for some gaming and person finance software. Running Quicken with Rosetta sucks.

This build of Vista runs REALLY well on the laptop in my sig as well.

 

[aiongiant]

hey patseguin
i jsut installed vista on my mac pro but i'm having issues with my vid card having not enough resources or something
did you do anything differntly?
do you have an IDE drive plugged in?

is your Mac Pro stock?

 

[Kingsly]

Did you have to delete the EFI partition?

 

[Nermal]

The latest public build (5536) runs without deleting EFI. I don't recommend doing an upgrade from XP.

 

[Kingsly]

The latest public build (5536) runs without deleting EFI. I don't recommend doing an upgrade from XP.

Now I just have to get my hands on a copy...

 

[aiongiant]

ive jsut unplug my IDE drive from it where i installed vista beforehand but says my video card doens't have enough resource to run properly (getting 4bit colros)

but yea so did it normal bootcamp way with the internal SATA
and i get an error that Windows did not find a partition suitable for installation
i dunno what it is casue it worked before on the IDE

any thoughts?

 

[Nermal]

Which video card do you have? Also, how big did you make the partition? If I recall correctly, it needs to be at least 14 GB, I used 32.

 

[aiongiant]

i have a stock Mac Pro 3GHz
partitioned it at 35gb

maybe it needs to be fat32 thing at 32gb?

 

[aiongiant]

jsut tried it and it says...

when selecting the partition Disk 0 Partition 3 (made by bootcamp 1.1)

"This computer's hardware may not support booting to this disk. Ensure that the disk's controller is enabled in the computer's BIOS menu"

then when you click next it will say....

"Windows is unable to find a system volume that meets it's criteria for installation"


also the windows vista setup gui is at very low liek 8bit colors is that normal for everyone that has done this?

 

[thejadedmonkey]

also the windows vista setup gui is at very low liek 8bit colors is that normal for everyone that has done this?

Windows does that automatically if it doesn't have the drivers to recognize the video card. It did that with my old laptop when I installed XP. The video card had a whole 4mb of memory, so it could have displayed 32bit colors, but XP dropped it to 8bit so it wouldn't accidently damage the card. Very smart, that XP installer is

 

[amin]

jsut tried it and it says...

when selecting the partition Disk 0 Partition 3 (made by bootcamp 1.1)

"This computer's hardware may not support booting to this disk. Ensure that the disk's controller is enabled in the computer's BIOS menu"

then when you click next it will say....

"Windows is unable to find a system volume that meets it's criteria for installation"

That happened to me, then my Mac Pro got caught in a loop where I couldn't eject the Vista disk (tried the usual key combos, mouse button holding, etc), couldn't boot into OS X, and eventually had to pull out the optical drive to hit the eject button. Gave up on Vista and installed XP, which also won't pay any attention to the keyboard eject button despite my having installed the drivers per Boot Camp instructions =[.

 

[seanf]

i jsut installed vista on my mac pro but i'm having issues with my vid card having not enough resources or something
did you do anything differntly?

Have you installed drivers for the GeForce 7300 GT? If you installed the 32bit version of Vista try these and if you installed the 64bit version try these. Please be aware both of these driver packages are beta versions.

Sean

 

[MRU]

Where did you read that the GMA950 does?

EDIT - I googled and found references to back up your statement. Thanks.

I posted back a few months ago that Aero worked on my macbook, and with the latest vista, it works out of the box...

Intel ALWAYS said it was ready for Vista, it was just naysayers who said it wasnt.

 

[aiongiant]

Have you installed drivers for the GeForce 7300 GT? If you installed the 32bit version of Vista try these and if you installed the 64bit version try these. Please be aware both of these driver packages are beta versions.

Sean

ive tried those but the problem is that there isn't enough resources for the video card to work properly not a driver problem i think