Markus

With the advent of the Intel based Macs, some of us had thoughts of dual-booting OS X with XP, if only for the geek/cool factor of it. Hopes were dashed when it was revealed the new machines used EFI rather than BIOS, which meant no XP. Vista was meant to support EFI, but no-one got it running, plus MS has recently made comments that EFI won't be supported by Vista (well, not 32bit Vista, maybe 64bit).

A contest was launched to see if XP could be made to run on an Intel based Mac. A few were sceptical that it could be done in the timeframe alloted, but a couple of people have done it.

A few screenshots and video have been posted showing the Mac booting into XP, and testing has been performed and from the looks of things it all working.

As one can imagine the forum where most of the info is hosted is down at the moment, you know what us geeks are like.

No doubt slashdot and other services will carry the story and links to the bootloader when it's available.

ScoobyDoo555

what a waste of a mac

Dan

DrEvil

I still can't believe MAC went with Intel..

And agree, what a waste - running XP that is.

Markus

Alex,
I know, some of the dev team here are still in shock Have to admit it's a good move, they were never going to get a G5 laptop, which is what they really needed. The MacBook Pro is ok, but better models will be along at some point.

The iMac is rather nice and certainly quick enough, and no doubt the Mac Pro desktops will be a wee bit faster than the current dual/quad/whatever they are G5 desktops.

I do agree that running XP is a bit of a waste, most of the time you'd want to run Windows would be alongside OS X, so you can copy and paste things.

I'm struggling to think of a reason why you would actually want to dual boot XP and OS X. Games maybe, and the odd need to run a windows app, but apart from that, there's nothing bar the cool/geek factor.

I do have a spare partition on my machine, and I will reformat it to MSDOS and once the forums are up again, I want to find out if you need to burn a CD (you have to create a slipstreamed CD from your XP SP2 cd, plus the files you download for the bootloader) from the PC or if you can simply get nero to create an ISO and then burn that from the mac. I don't have a burner on my server.

If you can create an ISO, then I'm sure someone will do that and then host it somewhere, which will make things ultra simple. I'm also sure that some of the other bits you need to do could be simplified with an applescript application.

So at some point I'll give it a whirl and see if it actually works.

DrEvil

Yep - to say you've done it i guess. But as you say, WinXP emulator would be what you want, so that you can run it within a window on your OSX desktop... Geek factor - too right!

RichB

I'd love to be able to test IE6 on XP in a window on my G5, then I can throw this Dell heap of junk in the bin thats sat next to it...

ScoobyDoo555

Why not use IE that comes with the Mac? Safari's much better anyway

Dan

JackClark

IE doesn't come with Macs any more, MS have dropped it. I installed Firefox last night after giving up trying to get Safari to refresh a cached page.

RichB

"Why not use IE that comes with the Mac?"

hahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahhahahhahah ha hahahhahahhahahahah

You are kidding right?

I build websites but I build them on my Mac, sadly CSS support is different between Safari/Firefox and IE and Mac IE is the absolute worst of the worst!

olliecampbell

iTrader: (3)

Hmm i like linux, although cant use it for my job (Lotus Notes Admin etc) so have to dual boot. I love the Mac hardware, so mac hardware plus XP would be great

Markus

If you have a G5, then get a copy of Microsoft Virtual PC, or if you want a free solution, try Q. I've used both on PPC and they work at a fairly decent speed.

SwissTony

iTrader: (19)

looks interesting though

wonder what he is going to mdo with the money??

http://www.engadget.com/2006/03/15/x...ctel-the-movie

Dracoro

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4816520.stm

Markus

Am just slipstreaming an XP SP2 setup at the moment, so might give this a go when that's done. Just waiting on a CD burner for the PC, as I don't think creating an ISO on the PC and getting the mac to burn it works too well.

stevencotton

Run it under VMWare, I used to do that on my Debian at the FT where they forced us all to use Notes.

Markus

OK, well, I got the iMac dual booting with XP. Did have a few problems, mainly as I had three partitions on my machine and due to the way winonmac works, it has a little problem with this. Think it's due to it using MBR which supports only four partitions (primary partitions I guess. If the others were logical drives then it might be better, not sure). All in all not bad at all, and it's only version 0.1, so no doubt more changes will be made.

I've since reformatted things as I need the additional partitions and once you have applied the patch you cannot use the OS X installer to install/reinstall as it won't allow you to select the existing partitions due to it not liking the partition map that is now set on the drive.

One hopes we'll be able to use external drives for the XP setup at some point, in which case I'll revisit things.

Right now I've rebuilt my machine and am using the latest version of Q to try and setup XP, as I've been told it's now working

mattbeef

XP on a bootable firewire drive would be awesome

Markus

Yup it would and Blanka reckons it shouldn't be too hard to do, and hopes that once the sourceforge project is up and running it'll be on the list of things to get working.