If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you have already seen my infatuation
with
using
Apple
hardware. With a freshly pressed copy of Apple’s latest, OS X 10.6 now in my hot little hands, it was time to install both the Leopard and Windows 7 RTM on my main desktop Mac Pro. After playing around with OS X 10.6 and seeing that if certainly felt faster on the same hardware than 10.5, I started Boot Camp and told it which drive I wanted to use for Windows and away I went.
After booting off the Windows 7 x64 DVD, I had my first scary moment. While OS X reported the drives in the machine in proper bay order, Windows 7 did not. Fortunately for me, I had written down the model numbers and disk spaces beforehand so I was able to properly figure out which drive I had marked for Windows. The Windows 7 install went swimmingly and I was pleasantly surprised to see that Windows 7 only reported the ACPI device as missing in the Device Manager. Additionally, I noticed that the sound card wasn’t listed either.
Part of my concern about the drivers was that my machine, a first generation Mac Pro (model MacPro 1,1), does not have x64 support from Apple. Under Vista, I’d managed to get everything I needed working, but didn’t have all the seamlessness of later Macs. I popped in the OS X 10.6 DVD, which contains the Windows drivers, and figured it was worth a shot to give Setup.exe a run. Sadly, the results were not happy:
Before I dove into WinDBG and started hacking things in memory for the setup process, I thought I’d poke around the 10.6 “Boot Camp” directory to see if anything jumped out. I noticed as I started looking that the DVD access was quite slow so I copied the “Boot Camp” directory to my hard disk. My guess is that since the 10.6 DVD is a mixed OS X and Windows DVD, it just takes a lot more to access it.
Looking in the “Boot CampDriversApple” directory, I noticed BootCamp64.MSI along with an x64 directory. That file was only 3 MB so it couldn’t be the main installer. Feeling frisky, I thought I’d give it a shot to see what would happen. I opened CMD.EXE with admin rights and ran the following command in the “Boot CampDriversApple” directory:
msiexec /i BootCamp64.msi
That started a massive flurry of installations and it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that that was all it takes to get all the Apple drivers onto an unsupported system. Thanks for not making it hard, Apple! After a reboot, I was thrilled to see that everything was working on the machine including the read only HFS driver that is now part of Boot Camp 3.0.
So OS X 10.6 is running great, Windows 7 is running great, and John is in love with Apple hardware all over again.
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Well, maybe you noticed that by using this trick neither Apple nor Microsoft can easily assist you when there is a problem.
Luckily you are a guru in this field, better than most support engineers from both companies.
All you should have had to do is look for the drive that the Boot Camp Assistant named "BOOTCAMP" in order to figure out which partition you wanted.
Unseelie,
That's what I would have thoughth too. :) Strangly I didn't see the BOOTCAMP partition during the install. It certainly shows up after it's installed.
- John Robbins
Every time i write in "command prompt" as Admin, the following:
D:> cd"Boot CampDriversApple", to try the solution above, it says Can anyone tell me what I'm doing wrong. Please HELP!!!!!
Dan,
0. Start Windows 7.
1. Look in Explorer first and determine the drive letter for your SuperDrive according to Windows. In my case, that letter is D:
2. Put your Snow Leopard DVD into the drive.
3. Open a Command Prompt in Administrator mode.
4. In the Command Prompt type the following (use your the drive letter determined in step 1).
D:
5. Your command prompt will look like the following:
D:>
6. Now type the following:
cd "Boot CampDriversApple"
7. Finally, type
msiexec /i BootCamp64.msi
----------
Hope it helps!
-John Robbins
thanks...
Thank you for posting this info, due to downsizing my living situation I'm kicking my PC to the curb and dual booting my 1st Gen Mac Pro. Glad to hear everything is running smoothly so now I'll feel confident purchase my copy of Windows 7.
I’ve heard there are some wildlife groups trying to get Apple to do more stuff with the actual S.L.’s lol. I don’t know- people are saying it’s good PR for Apple- they should jump on that.
Thanks John! I am in the same position right now with my mac pro 2006, 1.1, and was really shocked by the news of windows 7 not supported on my machine when Apple claimed that all intel mac should... (http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3920)
Question for you now, the SL OS will not run in 64 bits, so even if I am really disapointed about that, did you find a real big difference with performance from 10.5 to 10.6? I mean 10.5 is not really slow on a mac pro 1.1...
Martin,
Snow Leopard is running 64-bits for me. Run Activity Monitor and it will show what processes are 64-bits and which are 32-bits. Also, 10.6 sees all 8GB RAM I have in the machine.
Not having done any hard core performance tests I can't say for certain that 10.6 is faster, but the most important performance metric of all applies to 10.6: it feels faster to me. :)
- John Robbins