17 March 2006
Initial Reactions to Installing XP on Intel Macs
I started playing. Making the Mac-enabled XP CD was very easy. Unfortuently, building a PC/Mac compatible disk was not.
Initially, I deviated from the very precise howto.txt Narf distributed. I did not wipe the drive. Instead, I plugged in a 250 GB ATA/133 drive on Firewire. I partioned that with a small Mac OS Extended (Journaled) partition and a large MS-DOS partition. Yes, did them with the GUID partition map. Put the xom.efi file on the MOSEJ drive, blessed it, rebooted. Got the Mac/Windows selector as promised. Inserted the XP CD, chose Windows. Sure enough, it starts booting. But it stalls out on “Starting Windows.” Oh well, I didn’t follow Narf’s rules.
I did try once more, but quickly gave up.
Booted back into OSX. Repartitioned the external drive, for use in backing up my main drive. I copied the important stuff over, then started the OSX DVD installer. Followed all the instructions, this time, but to my surprise, I got this error! http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=303220 . There was one difference: It referred to the internal disk, not the firewire drive. Did some more poking around and I could not find any way in the installer to make an internal disk partitioned for GUID. There is indeed an “Options” button in the installer for Firewire disks, but it will not show up for internal disks. I did a Get Info on the drive, and even more surprisingly, it claimed to be partitioned to FDISK standards. Huh? When did that happen?
I restarted the Mac in Disk Target Mode. Connected it to my Windows laptop, and the drive showed up in Windows’ Disk Administrator as it should, and really was formatted with an MBR. The first three partitions were Primarys, and OSX had silently made 4 and 5 logical drives. I delete ‘em all, safely disconnect the Mac and then restart it to reattempt the install. Still, it claims to not be able to install to any volumes, and extremely surprisingly, its still FDISKed. Out of options, I turn to the web. There’s nothing. Not even on wiki.onmac.net. I’m screwed.
But there was one last possibility, not documented but worth a try. I went to the erase options for the entire drive, and did it. It created the one partition, and converted the partition map back to GUID. I then went back to partition options, split that partition and came up with an XP (MSDOS) partition and Macintosh (MOSEJ) partition, just like Howto said. OSX then proceeded to install normally.
It now being insanelly early in the morning, Windows will have to wait a few more hours. I’m just relieved OSX was recoverable.
So thats how you fix the internal hard drive, if you lose the ability to install OSX. I suspect it was caused by putting the xom.efi file on the external drive, but can’t prove it and don’t particulary want to. Just do an erase instead of re-partitioning, and than split it as neccessary.