Slashdot Mirror
Bounty For Booting XP on the Intel iMac
An anonymous reader writes "The race is on. You can try to get the bounty for booting Windows XP on iMac. At this moment there is $2773 waiting for the winner. However several people have brickified their iMacs when playing with EFI." I imagine those tech support calls are hysterical ;)
No, it shouldn't. You apparently either have no idea what BartPE is, or ou completely failed to even read the article summary.
BartPE is simply a custom version of XP that can boot from removable media. The EFI rom on the MacTel machines seems to forbid booting an El Torito volume.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
From Dave Schroeder, posted to http://nak.journalspace.com/?cmd=displaycomments&d cid=407&entryid=407
By following these steps, the iMacs that had difficulty with certain EFI modules appear to have been restored to a functioning state:
1. Disconnect the internal hard disk
2. Disconnect the iMac from AC power
3. Plug in AC while holding the power button
4. Power up the iMac and zap NVRAM (cmd-opt-P-R)
The hard disk can be reformatted and the operating system restored.
1.Walk it into any Apple store or Apple authorized repair shop.
2. Tell them your mac stopped working.
3. When they ask you for the symptoms, tell them it showed a spining ball in many colors, like a rainbow. Then it beeped. Then it told you to reboot in many languages.
4. When you rebooted it, it refused to power up.
5. The proper answer to any probing questions is "uh, I don't know."
Under any circumstances are you to give the impression that you know more about macs than the guy taking your repair order. If the contents of the drive are an issue, take the drive out, connect it to another machine and delete the partitions. Check out the "user installable parts" document for your mac, it will tell you the exact procedure for pulling a drive without voiding the warranty. For the first generation iMac G5 it even tells you the color of the 3 screws that you need to remove, I bet that has not changed with the Intel version.
Pedro
----
The Insomniac Coder
EFI isn't the only problem for the new Macs to run Windows. I wrote an article that looks at a range of problems: http://www.roughlydrafted.com/Jan06.IntelMacsWin1. html
On the other hand there is no requirement on hardware manufacturers that their machines must be made to boot Windows, just because they have an x86-compatible chip inside.
EXACTLY!!! Most people don't get the idea that two computers can be completely different even if they have the CPU in common. Some examples:
- Z80: Game Boy, Game Gear, TI graphing calcs, and CP/M machines all have the same processor but totally different architectures.
- Motorola 680x0: Classic Macs, Amigas, and 68k-based TI graphing calcs are all different
- PowerPC: Power Macintoshes and PREP machines are incompatible.
Perhaps the x86 Macs are PC-compatible, but nothing says they HAVE to be. Just look at history.
Microsoft-free since March 28, 2004