Windows Vista works on Mac!

[animefx]

help

I went into the Vista installer and deleted the 200 MB EFI partition, and then I ran the repair on startup and it still wasn't able to fix it!!

Now I'm unable to delete the Vista partition or Run BootCamp assistant so I can start over again. I'm not sure what to do... help! I have a useless Vista taking up 23 gigs of hard drive space that I can't even delete now.

 

[animefx]

and no mac's disk utility won't delete the vista partition... although it sees it.

 

[cr2sh]

(walks away from this thread silently.)

I'll be back when you guys get this stuff figured out.

 

[MRU]

In future guys simply do this. (you will need another mac)

Download CarbonCopycloner. It's freeware so use it.

Backup your HD before you've partitoned it. Do this to an external HD, will take an hour or so, but hey it's worth it.

Run Bootcamp and partiton and install Vista, if you delete wrong partitions are screw up, simply boot up your mac in firewire target mode by holding down T.

Connect this via firewire to another mac, and connect your external HD with the osX backup image on to the working mac. Simply run disk utility and erase the entire contents of the bodged up mac's drive.

Then run carboncopycloner from the new pc and tell it to restore the image of OSX you backed up onto the other drive.

Hey presto you have a fully working back to square 1 OSX drive.

You amy have lost an hour or two, but you havent lost any data and its less hassle, you only have to tell it to restore / backup and walk away while it does it......

 

[grabberslasher]

Now I've run into another problem. Without the EFI partition, I can't run Boot Camp! How can I restore EFI so that I can resize my partitions?

NO YOU DO NOT HAVE TO FORMAT AND REINSTALL OS X TO REPLACE THE EFI PARTITION. Sorry for the caps, but I have to make this point.

It's a real bitch restoring the EFI partition and getting Boot Camp to run again, but it's possible (as I have done it).

You must make a "simple volume" in Vista's disk management (Start->Run->compmgmt.msc) on the first section of the disk. You will see, there should be a 200mb partition that is free and coloured black in the disk management panel. Format that partition FAT32.

Reboot from the OS X install DVD (important), and do a "diskutil list" on the command line to find out the node (/dev/rdisk0s1 usually) for that 200MB FAT32 partition.

After finding what it's node is, you must use fdisk as root to edit to MBR on that partition and change its type to "EE" (Protected MBR). WARNING YOU CAN EASILY ERASE your entire disk using fdisk. Do not do this unless you know what you're doing. Make sure to note the starting point and size of the partition before you edit it. ("fdisk -e /dev/rdisk0", "print" (shows info, start, size, etc), "edit #" (the number of the EFI partition) - then you set it to EE).

When the type is changed to EE, OS X will recognize the hard disk properly and Boot Camp should run fine.

I would post more detailed instructions, but I'm going from memory as I'm away from home.

 

[dextertangocci]

Just finished my download in 1 hour Love my DS3 line here at work.

How fast is the download speed of that line?

 

[swano]

Why!?!?!?!?

I thought the idea of using a mac of any kind was to get away from windows to use a computer and os that works...why would anyone want to install anything windows anyways. Isnt that the problem...argh, I hate windows...it keeps freezing, I need drivers....blah blah....HEY, now we can install windows on a mac...what the hell!?

 

[grabberslasher]

I thought the idea of using a mac of any kind was to get away from windows to use a computer and os that works...why would anyone want to install anything windows anyways. Isnt that the problem...argh, I hate windows...it keeps freezing, I need drivers....blah blah....HEY, now we can install windows on a mac...what the hell!?

People use Macs because they want to use Macs, not because they "don't want to run windows" (or if so then thats a very silly reason). Why complain when some people decide they still need to use Windows in some way? They're entitled to do what they want.

 

[MRU]

How fast is the download speed of that line?

Well my 2mb connection downloading at a sustained rate did it in 4 hours 25 minutes, so I'm hazarding a guess at 8mb? Maybe slightly more...

 

[dextertangocci]

Well my 2mb connection downloading at a sustained rate did it in 4 hours 25 minutes, so I'm hazarding a guess at 8mb? Maybe slightly more...

Wow, I never knew download speed could get that fast!

 

[DJS1234]

well my 8mb DSL line just downloaded the 32bit image (About 3.1gig I think from memory) in 1hour and 9 mins average download of 794k per second which is quite impressive for adsl!

So now what to do with it... do I Carbon Copy Clone my OS X install and go for it or do I throw together a WinTel box from spare bits (Might have to spend a few £££) and do it that way

hmmmmm decisions decisions

would be nice if Apple would update Boot Camp (Wishful thinking!)

 

[animefx]

We can't get into Vista to do this. Part of our problem is that Vista won't load after its installed, we can only access whats in the Vista installer. Unless your talking about running the command prompt from the Vista installer and then using fdisk to do what you are saying below? If so, I'm not sure how to do that.

Also, my EFI partition is deleted, so I can't format what is no longer there right?

"You must make a "simple volume" in Vista's disk management (Start->Run->compmgmt.msc) on the first section of the disk. You will see, there should be a 200mb partition that is free and coloured black in the disk management panel. Format that partition FAT32."

 

[MRU]

well my 8mb DSL line just downloaded the 32bit image (About 3.1gig I think from memory) in 1hour and 9 mins average download of 794k per second which is quite impressive for adsl!

So now what to do with it... do I Carbon Copy Clone my OS X install and go for it or do I throw together a WinTel box from spare bits (Might have to spend a few £££) and do it that way

hmmmmm decisions decisions

would be nice if Apple would update Boot Camp (Wishful thinking!)

Yeah my drive is carbon cloned. I'm still holding off installing vista until someone confirms drivers etc.... are all working..

 

[Nermal]

What you should do if possible, is once you have osX up and running and your apps installed. Before you go any further, use Carbon Copy Cloner to copy your entire disc as it is to an image on an external drive / ipod?

I tried to make an image of my HD using Disk Utility (booted from the OS X DVD of course) but it failed with an error (-39 if I recall correctly). Is CCC more likely to work?

Unfortunately, I can't use grabberslasher's instructions to replace EFI because I can't get Vista running in the first place

Edit: Hmm, I believe that you can resize volumes from the command line. Time to look through some man pages.

 

[UberMac]

OK, so I'm one of those stupid teenager thing-ies who tends to run into things without thinking...well I'm not going to do that this time with a Vista install.

A question - the people who have Vista "installed" at the moment, can you still boot into OS X? Is the issue just that BootCamp doesn't "boot" so you can't boot into Vista, and thus have a wasted 30Gb of HD?

Thanks

Uber

(Oh, and has anyone got some simple steps to follow to get working? [it's worth asking!])

 

[MRU]

Is CCC more likely to work?

Yeah. I couldnt use disk utility to make it work either, CCC is only 800k and free so it's a far better choice. Just make sure you choose image in the settings otherwise it will just clone your entire hd ~ verbatim to another drive. I just create an image as it doesnt confuse the other drive.


Oh and Uber, yes you can still boot into OSX BUT! you cant use bootcamp to restore your drive. Hence the reason I clone a copy of my HD before hand.

 

[UberMac]

Oh ok, well that's not half as scary as it could have been!

Does anybody have any recommendations on how big to make my Vista partition if I can't change it afterwards. I'd quite like a full install of vista - but won't be using much space on top of that (ie. I'll install Office and VB 6) - any ideas?

Is it possible to just plain reformat the Vista partition after install (from OS X preferably) in order to at least have that area free for use by OS X, even if it doesn't merge it with your main partition?

Uber

 

[Nermal]

I eventually got it working. In the first minute of use, I got three "are you absolutely sure you want to run this app?" messages, and managed to cause a hard crash two minutes later. Of course I hadn't installed any third-party (or even first-party) software by this point.

 

[grabberslasher]

We can't get into Vista to do this. Part of our problem is that Vista won't load after its installed, we can only access whats in the Vista installer. Unless your talking about running the command prompt from the Vista installer and then using fdisk to do what you are saying below? If so, I'm not sure how to do that.

Also, my EFI partition is deleted, so I can't format what is no longer there right?

"You must make a "simple volume" in Vista's disk management (Start->Run->compmgmt.msc) on the first section of the disk. You will see, there should be a 200mb partition that is free and coloured black in the disk management panel. Format that partition FAT32."

If you can get into Vista then you can follow my instructions. I wouldn't have posted them if I hadn't actually used the exact same method on my MacBook Pro.

You can also remove the EFI partition using "gpt remove -i 1 /dev/rdisk0" (MAKE SURE that your EFI partition is #1 - "gpt show") when booted from the OS X Install DVD. Reboot then and boot the Vista setup DVD, run the "recovery tools" and that should make Vista work then.

I can't "guarantee" that this method will work for you, but all I'm saying is that I've used the same process on both my iMac Core Duo and my 17" MacBook Pro and it worked flawlessly.

 

[Noted]

How can I remove the Windows Beta trademark thing at the bottom right of the screen?

 

[thefunkymunky]

Does anyone know where the "fixboot" option is in the recovery tools. The automatic fixing option doesnt fix the winload.exe error on startup for me. Anyone know how to fix it?

 

[ImAlex]

It might work with iMac aswell, hopefully it works with Mac Mini and MacBook.



But what's the solution for those who have iBook G4 ???

Unfortanetly you can't install Windows XP nor Windows Vista on PowerPC processor Macs, just on Intel Macs. It has to do with the chips.

 

[treblah]

Unfortanetly you can't install Windows XP nor Windows Vista on PowerPC processor Macs, just on Intel Macs. It has to do with the chips.

That is not entirely true. VirtualPC 7, but it is not native and pretty much sucks.

 

[MRU]

That is not entirely true. VirtualPC 7, but it is not native and pretty much sucks.

prety much talk about understatement.