Boot Camp with Vista? I don't think so!

  • Article

Oops, where's the weekend? It's gone. What did I do? Try to get my MacBook Pro dual booting with Vista by using Apple Boot Camp. No way Jose! Here's what I've tried.

Attempt 1:
Installed bootcamp and then tried to make it dual boot with XP to start with. First problem is that the CD I burned from the ISO image I downloaded through my MSDN subscription wasn't liked by the machine. The fact that a MacBook Pro DVD player doesn't have a real eject button doesn't help! (BTW, rebooting while pressing down the mouse button ejects the CD/DVD always).

Attempt 2:
If my XP media is corrupted maybe I can just skip this and install Vista immediately? I took the latest build I have (<5320) but I couldn't get the installation started because nor keyboard nor mouse were recognized. USB keyboard and mouse didn't help either. 

Attempt 3:
Got an original Windows XP with SP2 cd and installed from this CD without errors.  Installed the Mac drivers, updated Windows and voila. It works like a charm.
Now back to Vista I thought, I started the Vista installation from the running XP. Everything worked until the first reboot. Vista was obviously confused by the partitioning.
I tried to change the partitioning. Put your Mac installation CD in the drive and boot holding the c key down. You enter the setup menu and can use the Disk Utility. However the repartitioning didn't go down well. It didn't show that 200MB partition I read about and I wanted to remove

Attempt 4:
I wanted to reinstall Windows XP. Somehow, I could get this done from the Boot Camp utility anymore which complained that I need to update my software which had already been done. There were no updates available.
Right, reinstalled Tiger (man that takes long too!) updated the Mac OSX software, installed bittcamp.
Started installing Windows XP, during the installation I removed that 200MB partition and continued  to install without issues. Now Vista (again). Started installing Vista from within XP and it did continue after the first reboot. Jippie! I thought :-(
After a rebootit started with the nice black screen with the colored logo but immediately after bluescreened.

Since I want to keep playing with Tiger, I'm not interested in the single boot Windows solution. So my verdict? It's a no go, yet.

Gotto go, it's still sunny outside. First I need to find my family!

This post is about: Vista, Apple Boot Camp