How not to boot Windows XP on an Intel Mac
Neosmart seems to be getting a whole heap of links for their theory on how to boot Windows XP on an Intel Mac. Sounds great, right? Just one problem, leaving aside the whole part about the MacBook not shipping yet so there being no way to verify this, their method just ain’t going to work as written.
1. Using the Bootable Acronis Disk Director CD on the MacBook, shrink the Mac partition. Create a new partition of type NTFS/HPFS in the remaining space.
Uhm, and just how did we boot Acronis again? If it can boot on an Intel Mac they certainly forgot to mention anything about it on their website. Not a mention of EFI that I can see. Note only that, but Acronis doesn’t know anything about HFS+ so you won’t be resizing an HFS+ partition with it, you’d corrupt the filesystem beyond recognition. So it looks like even at step 1 we’re out of luck.
Steps 2-15 are done on a generic PC that can already boot Windows XP so we can ignore them.
16. In Mac now, hack the Darwin Bootloader to add another entry that chainloads Drive(0) Partition(2). With GRUB it would look something like this… I’m not sure if Darwin is the same, but this step is very simple, and has nothing to do with EFI.
title Windows XP
rootnoverify (hd0,1)
chainloader +1
Well the Darwin bootloader bears no resemblence to GRUB. The Darwin bootloader on PowerPC Macs and on the old x86 Darwin version basically just boots Darwin. No options, you’re getting Darwin. There’s no magic chainloader option in every previous version of the Darwin bootloader, so don’t go expecting that it suddenly exists for Intel Macs.
Nobody has yet to even get Vista to boot on an Intel Mac (the best anyone has gotten is the “Press Any Key to boot from CD” message), so how the Vista files are magically helping I’m not sure either.
There’s very little relating to an Intel Mac in the article, just wild theories that to be honest just don’t make any sense. This is an article to take with a large dose of sodium chloride.
January 31st, 2006 at 6:19 am
True.
January 31st, 2006 at 4:21 pm
[...] However, someone over at allocinit.net basically says that the “Computer Guru” is just blowing smoke. [...]
February 5th, 2006 at 1:30 am
Thanks for the clarification but has anyone heard of the Intel Imac? Started shipping at the same time as the MacBook was announced. You guys keep talking about how this can’t be tested until the MacBooks come out but you can test it right now. Go out and spend the $1400 or so and get XP running on the machine and you can claim a $10,000 dollar prize!
February 5th, 2006 at 2:26 am
[...] :: Cons :: However, after you have thanks the great guru, there is another side that you may want to read about. Why they claimed that, this tricks of installing Windows XP on a MacBook may not work. Their claiming of How Not to Boot Windows XP On An Intel-Mac. As allocinit.net mentioned that the tricks might be a mistaken tips made by Ramblings Of Computer Guru. You can read more about their articles on How not to boot Windows XP on an Intel-Mac. [...]
February 7th, 2006 at 3:41 am
[...] Great, this is my second post on XBlog, and hopefully it will help some of those around reading this blog. I am taking in charge of this blog for at least 2 weeks, David are having his Chinese New Year Holiday .. How come he gets all the fun, and i had to do the job search post stuff. Yeah, this news about install Windows XP on Mac thing, i have to look around or google around for information. What to do? A job is a job. Here’s some snacks that i found out while googling around. Before posting this, i did get a permission from David whether is it ok to post or write on this blog about this, and what he answer me was “ok..good..go ahead”. So no clue whether other already know about this whether this is a true facts or really does work. I also no clue at all. I did read some information from a website that xblog had mentioned about they have a guide on how to install Windows XP on Mac and also i did went another website that is refering that Mac are indeed unable to run Windows XP because of file system differences. Here’s the snack. Anyone might have known about this software (except me) its called OpenOSX Wintel for Mac OS X, the name Wintel sound familiar, i think i heard about the name somewhere or some hardware name. [...]
March 23rd, 2008 at 12:10 am
[...] [even later] neosmart.net has instructions that might work. Or might not, according to allocinit.net. [...]