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 ;)

Brickified?

[SpooForBrains]

Not to be too picky, but the correct word, I believe, is "bricked". Although whether there's an actual dictionary definiton of the word in this context I do not know.

Re:BartPE

[TheRealMindChild]

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.

Re:Brickified?

[ettlz]

Um, doesn't the verb "to brick [it]" mean to crap oneself in en_GB?

UNBRICK your Intel iMac

[Knytefall]

From Dave Schroeder, posted to http://nak.journalspace.com/?cmd=displaycomments&d cid=407&entryid=407 [journalspace.com]

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.

Re:No EFI backwards compatibility module on iMacs

[Bert64]

I'm sure macs support ACPI, i seem to remember that even the PPC ones did...
The difference however, is that they support ACPI and MS-ACPI which is quite different (and the reason why linux acpi support doesn't work on some machines, since it strictly follows the intel acpi specs)

How to report a brickified iMac to Apple

[pvera]

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.

Re:How to report a brickified iMac to Apple

[ZachPruckowski]

Wrong. There is no warranty-safe user access to the iMac HDs. You can't get past the iSight cable or something. All it allows is memory under warranty, which is actually less than my iBook allows (memory+AirPort)

Re:Don't they have this backwards? Here you go

[mobby_6kl]

Installing and booting OSX on PCs. [profit42.com]
I expect to receive my rightfully earned $2500 by midnight.

Re:I suggest the Free Software Foundation

[Anonymous Coward]

I think this is more like an engine and apple says, change it if you want, but nothing else will fit under the hood and we're using custom motor mounts as well as our own transmission, fuel injector... and everything else.

Re:Small bills please...

[mh101]

They mean installing and booting it natively, so you can dual-boot OSX or Windows, not simply running it in an emulated or virtualized environment.

No it wouldn't

[Andy Dodd]

1) domU instances don't get access to the graphics hardware. If you want hardware video acceleration, virtualization is currently not an option. There's a chance that you can do it in a case where your system has multiple video cards, but so far there is no solution for concurrent access to the same video card.

2) dom0 instances (generally considered the "host") OS actually run under Xen too. Apparently (according to the Xen mailing lists) dom0 OSes actually need more modifications than domUs. Thus, it may not be possible to use OSX as a dom0.

Re:I suggest the Free Software Foundation

[Anonymous Coward]

"Running Windows" isn't "prohibited" by the "BIOS".
1) There's no fucking BIOS.
2) That's the problem.
3) Windows prohibits itself from booting on EFI (by not supporting it)

Fucktard.

No, because...

[daveschroeder]

- there is no legal way to do it (there is also currently no way to buy a standalone copy of Mac OS X for Intel, even if you choose to ignore the license agreement)

- the Mac OS X license agreement specifically states that Mac OS X can only be installed on a single Apple-branded computer

However,

- the Windows license agreement allows for this

- it is legal to purchase a license for Windows and use it on any machine desired, including an Intel-based iMac

Microsoft is a software company. Apple is a hardware company.

Re:Plug in AC while holding the power button???

[daveschroeder]

Um, I'm one of the people who originally was left with an Intel-based iMac that would no longer boot. Both the blog's owner (Nakfull Propaganda) and one of the other posters in the comments also had the exact same issue when attempting to load EFI modules that presumably were unsupported by, or otherwise disagreed with, Apple's EFI implementation.

The steps I posted apparently reset something related to the NVRAM or firmware in the machine, and allow the machine to be revived (albeit after formatting the hard disk). Considering my contact information is everywhere, and I posted all of my contact details in every blog post I made, it's ridiculously easy for people to contact me and/or see who I am and what I do.

Re:Don't they have this backwards? Here you go

[Anonymous Coward]

Too bad that's for installing the leaked prerelease 10.4.3 beta, instead of a system that actually has a good chance of being livable.

Re:Plug in AC while holding the power button???

[daveschroeder]

Please directly me to any place I've ever been against booting Windows. Second, I don't "host a site on how to do it". Nakfull Propaganda is not my blog. winxponmac.com is not my site. If you're referring to appleintelfaq.com, that is not a site about "how to run Windows on a Mac". It's a FAQ addressing the Apple/Intel transition. Once Windows is able to be installed directly on an Intel-based Mac, there definitely will be a FAQ entry about it, since that is indeed, well, a "Frequently Asked Question".

In fact, all of my posts here (and on the blog) on the topic are specifically FOR booting Windows on Intel-based Apple hardware, or using Windows in a virtual machine:

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=173774&cid=144 55455 [slashdot.org]
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=174115&cid=144 83527 [slashdot.org]
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=174203&cid=144 91243 [slashdot.org]

At the end of this post, I even enumerate the reasons why people might want to run Windows directly, as opposed to in a VM:

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=174845&cid=145 43786 [slashdot.org]

I've also been trying to install Windows directly on Intel-based Macs since the first day we were able to begin testing. Anyone can see the log of the various tries here:

http://nak.journalspace.com/?cmd=displaycomments&d cid=407&entryid=407 [journalspace.com] (Note: that is NOT my blog)

And finally, even though some of the EFI testing rendered the iMac unbootable (after someone else already had the same issue), I then posted my steps for recovering both in the story here [slashdot.org] and in the above blog entry's comments.

Nice try, though!

Re:UNBRICK your Intel iMac

[daveschroeder]

Um, you don't.

Sorry the instructions weren't more specific.

After you plug in the iMac while holding the power button (at this time that appears to be the equivalent of the old PMU/motherboard reset) and zap the NVRAM (probably not required after the reset, but I included it because that was in the series of steps I performed), you can reconnect the hard disk. You can then boot from the DVD installation media, reformat the drive, and restore the OS.

You don't disconnect or reconnect the hard disk while the machine is running.

Article: Will Macs boot Windows?

[DECS]

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 [roughlydrafted.com]

Re:I suggest the Free Software Foundation

[PastAustin]

Isn't that like a car manufacturer forcing you to only use a certain brand of fuel, or a certain brand of tyres?

Was it ever illegal before to not be able to run Windows on a Mac?
Nope. Because it wasn't because they were trying to make sure that you couldn't, it was because the os was incompatible with the hardware. Not illegal, incompatible.

Re:I suggest the Free Software Foundation

[linuxfanatic1024]

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.