Windows XP su Mac Air

[quickgraw]

Hi there,
I've just recived as a present a mac air and Im newbie as a osx user.
I need to add WindowsXP with Bootcamp (as Im working in computer vision) but I have some issue with it, especially because I dont have the superdrive.

It looked to me that the easy way of istalling xp was to use parallel to emulate the istallation disk and choosing as harddisk the partition bootcamp created.
Unfortunatly after the formatting and copy part (blue sceen) at restart seems not to recognize the disk as bootable as it freezes after printin booting from harddisk. Everything works fine if i use a virtual disk but then i dont know how to write that image (.hdd) to the disk.

Am I doing anything wrong? Any suggestion? Sould I try in another way?

Thanks for your help

 

[quickgraw]

any suggestions?

 

[MRU]

Use ANY USB external drive (doesn't have to be superdrive). I used my external xbox 360 HD-DVD add-on when I got my MBA to reinstall the OS as I didn't get the superdrive at the same time.

 

[quickgraw]

Well the problem is I dont have any external optical disk, I only had desktops so just internal drives: buying one now just for installing win is a shame...

Dont you guys know a way to install it trought external hd, virtualization or trought netboot with a MBP?

Thanks for help

 

[ayeying]

Well the problem is I dont have any external optical disk, I only had desktops so just internal drives: buying one now just for installing win is a shame...

Dont you guys know a way to install it trought external hd, virtualization or trought netboot with a MBP?

Thanks for help

You can get an enclosure and use your internal drive to install it.

 

[quickgraw]

You can get an enclosure and use your internal drive to install it.

Thanks for your answer ayeying, but I dont understand what you mean by enclosure, could you explain me a little better?

Regards

 

[velocityg4]

Here is the only tutorial I could find said you mentioned having a Macbook Pro (hereafter MBP).

Synopisis of above link (it seemed unclear to me since the author put his trial and error info into the guide)
1. Basically you create a bootcamp partition on both the Macbook Air (hereafter MBA) and MBP, use the NTFS file system.
2. Install Windows XP onto the MBP Bootcamp partition. (Do not activate Windows)
3. Copy MBA air drivers into a folder on the MBP while Windows is still running so that they will be available to the MBA once you transfer Windows.
4. Use Winclone to backup the installed Windows XP from the MBP.
Tranfer the Windows image from the MBP to MBA.
5. Use Winclone on the MBA to install the Windows image onto the Bootcamp partition.
6. Don't kill yourself in your grievous angst from installing Windows.
7. Install the MBA drivers from the folder you saved them into (you remembered to do this right).
8. Kill a twelve pack while you wait 10 hours for all of the Windows updates to install.

If you already have Windows installed and activated on the MBP. The above Winclone procedure will probably still work. But you will need another Windows Key for the MBA to activate Windows. Unless you remove Windows from the MBP. You would need to activate Windows by phone and boot into Safemode for this.

Thanks for your answer ayeying, but I dont understand what you mean by enclosure, could you explain me a little better?

Regards

An external enclosure is just the casing to but the optical drive in. This Syba enclosure is the cheapest on newegg.com.

By the way this Samsung is the cheapest external DVD drive on newegg it also burns CD's, DVD's and Dual Layer DVD's.

 

[quickgraw]

Hi,
Thanks for that hint, I'll try as soon as I get the MBP of my brother, that sould be in the weekend.

I just hope that there will be no hardware incompatibility issue: I managed with rEFIt to make the Parallel istalled windows xp boot but I get the missing hal.dll error or, if I correct the boot.ini to partition3, a STOP 0x0000007B blue screen of death (during install, under parallel, the bootcamp partition is the number 1, during boot, nativetly, sould be the number 3).
That sould be a drivers problem (or a corrupted MBR) that I think is caused by windows chosen drivers during istallation for the Parallel fake hardware that are not compatible with mac real hardware: infact the bootcamp partition still emulates nicely under parallel...

Anyway, Thanks again for you help

 

[Consultant]

You need XP SP2 or newer
or a non-machine specific xp install disk.

 

[quickgraw]

Yes, I used a general SP2 install disk but XP have static hal so major hardware changes may make it unbootale, and I fear that the case of switching from parallels during istallation to native running on usage...or do you think it may be something else?

Thanks