It’s finally been done. With the recent news and video of narf2006 running Windows XP on his Intel iMac, everyone was wondering when his solutions would be verified. Well today, Colin from OnMac.net, where the contest is held, verified narf’s solution and it was made public in a nice zip file with all of the things necessary, minus Windows XP, to dual-boot your Intel Mac. The $13,000+ prize money will go to narf2006 with donations afterward going to an open source project to promote XP on Intel Macs. If you haven’t seen narf’s video, take a look below. It goes through the installation up to booting into XP for the first time.
The installation procedures aren’t for those that don’t enjoy getting down and dirty. You have to make a custom XP SP2 disc slipstreamed with an included file, play with some of the directories and burn the CD in a special manner. Installation gets a bit more furry with having to create a new partition table. The notes state that this has only been tested on an Intel iMac, but I would presume it would work on an Intel Mac Mini as well. I might try this out on mine. This also means that I won’t be talking about this subject anymore, unless something new pops up, for those of you that don’t care much and have been counting how many XP on Mac articles I’ve posted.
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1. Partition the disk in two using the OSX CD: FAT and HFS+
2. Install OSX on the HFS+ partition.
3. Copy xom.efi (from xom.zip) into the hard disk
4. cd to the directory where you put xom.efi and type
sudo bless –folder . –file xom.efi –setBoot
5. Reboot, insert the XP CD, select windows using the arrows
and wait about 3 minutes
6. Choose the FAT partition you previously created.
(choose, not create! it should prompt for filesystem)
7. Install. Make sure to remove the CD on subsequent boots,
otherwise you’ll start the process over again.
Note: The “press any key to boot from CD” prompt doesn’t work yet
8. Done!
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Wow this might convince me to get a Mac Mini and slap XP on it. Now my inner tweaker is screaming for some for of BIOS tweaking, then again not sure if that is possible. Just another reason that the Mac Mini is the best buy from Apple.
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Something doesn’t look right about that video, maybe it’s the terrible lighting, or perhaps I just refuse to believe it.
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This is BIG news!
It will be interesting to see what Apple’s reaction to this will be hardware-wise, to see if they try to take any additional steps to prevent their hardware from supporting Windows.
Kathan, the video does look a little seedy, but there HAD to have been people that replicated that result in order to have declared a winner.
Here’s another mirror to the bootloader (hosted from my site) http://www.brianpinard.com/mactel/Winxponmac_0.1.zip
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i don’t think its just that easy to install, seems like you need lotsa skills
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ArsTechnica’s article on this says the two partitions are supposed to be HFS+ and NTFS. I’m curious about whether the non-HFS+ partition is supposed to be FAT or NTFS.
Everytime a video like this comes out, for some reason the lighting is always terrible!
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@Chris: Don’t rush out just yet. Reports are that video driver support isn’t there yet. I’d wait it out a little longer and see if someone can hack together a custom driver set.
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Agreed.
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I was wondering: is it just me or the radeon cores used in intel macs are essentially the same used in pcs. If they are, then why one cannot use the desktop or notebook drivers for them.
I have installed windows xp home on my mac, it was just like running windows on a pc. Allthough os is is much more stable. its nice that you can run both. Right now im getting ready to install debian linux on my mac dual boot