I will summarize my experience in computers: I have used them and fixed them for about 20 years. I am new to Macs, and in fact I have purposely bought some Macs to determine whether the hardware is flexible enough to run Windows, Unix, etc., depending on what I need.
Okay, so let’s step up to the top of the game for running Windows XP on a Mac. What you read may shock or disgruntle, so stay atune. Never used a Mac with dynamic disks and software RAID 1 under Windows? Read on.
This Apple Mac Pro that I got a few weeks ago is running pretty smoothly in Windows. I will detail all of the problems I have seen (other posts), plus some of the neat things I know it is doing right. First off, I installed Boot Camp beta, and then later I found and installed Refit.
rEFIt - An EFI Boot Menu and Toolkit Both seem to mostly work, but they both could use some improvement. The Boot Camp beta is okay, but it really struggles with partitioning and detection for Windows drives. No offense, but there should be better support for NTFS disks, plus all of the typical partitioning schemes used by Windows. I figured that Refit as a dedicated boot menu would do a lot better. However, it was a little confused by the ways I partitioned and formatted the disks in my Mac Pro. It took a lot of work to guess which menu option was the drive I wanted to boot from. Right now, I am choosing the black and white (or gray?) option for Legacy OS, IIRC. Choosing the Windows icons sometimes works, sometimes not. And I have wrapped around the screen of Refit, so it needs some more work to alleviate the issue of someone having lots and lots of partitions, like I do. It looks pretty dumb to have those big images as it is, but when they are corrupted as they wrap around the screen, it is hard to pick the appropriate boot drive. What refit needs is a way to display the partition NAME, not the number. An improved version might more easily explain the difference of booting a partition vs booting a MBR. Booting to a dynamic disk is probably going to be a smart improvement.
If anyone is going to do this type of testing Windows XP or Windows Vista at this level, you will need to experiment with partitioning. Nice thing about it is that the DVD drive of the Mac Pro is pretty fast, and so Setup doesn’t take too long to bring up. By the way, if you are using Windows XP upgrade, just buy an external USB DVD drive, and turn it on right about when Setup asks you to press F6. (Timing isn’t too critical, but you might have problems if your Windows 98 or Windows Me CD or boots instead of XP.) Of course, put the old windows in the second drive. Once you get to the partition choices, try different things. You might be trying this on a single physical hard drive – which is pretty easy to do using Boot Camp alone assuming <32 GB. But you may need to do more adjustments wither prior in Mac OS or in this setup screen. Don’t wipe out OS X unless you are going to run a server or something. I will later be testing the install of Server 2003 to see how it works, just not had the time. I focused on keeping Mac OS on the original 500GB drive, and putting Windows XP on two WD RAID edition drives located in Bay 2 and 4. Note: I had a little problem using Bay 3. Windows tries to boot to the disk in drive 3 more than Bay 2. I can’t remember all what happened, but it confused the Disk Management in that the disk in Bay 3 wanted to be before the disk in Bay 2. The order for Refit or for Setup may have been weird, too.
Okay, so after a few trial attempts at installing, I ended up with what I was aiming for. One critical thing I need to tell people is that I did the slipstreaming process (as many recommend) and it helps with a number of things. This way, even before you activate Windows XP, you have a lot of the fixes installed. I was not wanting to keep reactivating Windows, as I was purposely repartitioning and reformatting (fast) and reinstalling. I think it’s a plague that forces you to activate to get basic security downloads, but I guess M$ has little choice as they see it. But I need to let a few of you on a secret of slipstreaming. Do it smart. I had made some slipstreamed disks a long time ago when SP 1 came out, or maybe some for Windows 2000. But nowadays, there are some nice things you can do besides the service packs and security fixes. I looked at both nlite
nLite - Deployment Tool for the bootable Unattended Windows installation - Download and RyanVM.
RyanVM's MSFN Files Page What I found is that not only do these programs and systems allow you to slipstream, they can also install programs on the fly. I somehow missed the Adobe Reader 8 install, but I found an old Reader 7 and installed it, not realizing myself that the new one was available at Adobe or on the RyanVM website. So try and be careful, and look around for the latest software or you will feel dumb about having to uninstall and reinstall something.
One of the things I found besides the neat software was to discover the enhancements, tweaks, and configuration settings for Windows. This goes way beyond merely a way to install Windows in an unattended mode. That’s been done before (I used to use the floppy for this, with Windows 2000 setups.) But get this: let’s patch Windows XP to allow me to run a RAID 5 array or a mirrored hard drive! Ridiculously easy in nLite. Just download and install this add-on before you burn. I think there must be a thousand options in nLite, many of which are dumb, many of which will save time, and many of which are incredibly smart. So I checked lots of little boxes, and tried out a lot of little add-ons. For those who need to know exactly where to find this little RAID 5 patch, which allows mirroring (RAID 1) also, here is the link.
RyanVM.net Discussion Board :: View topic - [Released] XP RAID 5 Hack
I used the one from 2005, which is at
http://www.thethirdrow.plus.com/file...5_addon_v1.cab and
MD5 Hash: DBC21C273E107C842DEDED46BF2E328E
But be sure and look at the forum before blindly downloading the file. He may have a new version available.
So I have a screen shot of my Mac with my disk setup. It shows that I have a 30GB mirrored C: drive that I boot to. This is RAID 1, not allowed under Windows XP (ha, ha). All I did was install to a regular 30GB partition (NTFS) and left all of the other partitioning for later once WinXP installed. Then, I made this mirror first, using drives in bay 2 and bay 4. Bay 1 holds the original Mac OS X, which I can still choose to boot from at the Refit screen. Next, I made a striped RAID 0 drive D, which is two 270GB partitions which add up to 540GB for the drive. (Striping is allowed under Windows XP, but just so you know, you can’t stripe your C: drive using software Windows RAID. So for a Mac Pro, you can only stripe a D: drive or something) I then made two non-RAID drives, each of 165GB. These are for stuff and for backups. Since the 30GB Windows partition is fault-tolerant, it will be fine if I lost one drive. I did, by the way, test to see if the mirror works on a previous attempt. It works. But what I found out is that this time, Windows did not automatically make the changes to the BOOT.INI file, so I will need to make these changes myself. Actually, I need to find out exactly what to say in the file, I haven’t gotten around to editing it, yet. I will check Google here soon. Windows did warn me that it was for some reason unable to edit the boot.ini file, but I don’t know why it couldn’t.
I setup my pagefile to use drive D, by making it 6GB. I was told by Windows not to make the C: drive less than 200MB, so I forced it to that size as a max. When I install memory, the 6GB will be nice, but an overkill for 1 GB RAM. However, we must think ahead so that the pagefile is in as few pieces as possible. If we did this later, there could be numerous fragments of the pagefile – yuk. So make the pagefile right after you partition your drives.
And so now this is a nice, fast system. To be honest, the boot camp and refit stuff was a bit of a pain. It’s a lot easier to just pop the case off the Mac Pro, remove the Mac drive in Bay 1, and boot to Windows. Much less time wasted with the boot camp and refit issues. This works for me in case the Mac OS drive ever fails, Windows boots fine without a boot manager located on the Bay 1 hard drive. As for refit, I went into Mac OS X and edited the refit config file to boot to legacy before Mac and do a 3 second delay. I can still boot to Mac but only by selecting it in 3 seconds.
In retrospect, I think I would recommend removing the Mac hard drive from Bay 1 to do most or all of the Windows install and testing. Then, just put it back in when done. (Just install Windows in the other three bays, not bay 1) You will then probably need to install Refit to be able to keep the Mac drive in the case. Remember, the Mac Pro doesn’t support hot swapping, so power the thing off to remove or add drives. I would also get a second DVD drive. A good model is the Pioneer DVR-111D, which is about as good a drive as you can get. I have one on the way that I bought for around $33 at NewEgg, or they’re $10 more at macsales.com (OWC). The Mac Pro could probably take any brand, but the Pioneer is what Apple uses. I will try installing a Lite-On just for fun and see what it does.
As a side note, now I wonder how I’m going to eject the second drive. I hate that about Apples, since 1984 I have – why no eject buttons on hardware? This is a major pain in Windows. Apple, if you are paying attention, you need to correct this now that Boot Camp exists and it is 2007. It’s quite a pain. Maybe someone will sell little aftermarket kits that will measure and drill a hole into the Mac Pro case where the DVD drive has its eject button!!
I also decided that it is futile to do a lot of portioning work in Mac OS X. I think I tried a lot of different ways, but none of them worked the way I wanted. Remember, I was upgrading to dynamic disks, and there are certain requirements to do this, which probably won’t work with a Mac partition. So that disk utility in OS X wasn’t too useful IMHO for Windows drive partitions. The one in Windows setup was better, and the one in Windows XP is pretty much the thing to beat. Very easy to work with that, the help menus are very nice, and there is the Internet if you need more help.
As for drivers, I used the Boot Camp Macintosh Driver CD and got basically everything running. There are a few things not done right. The “Base system device” did not install, nor did some four of the chipset drivers, “Intel(R) 5000 Series Chipset PCI Express x4 Port 3 – 25E3” and port 5 - 25E5, port 6 -25E6, port 7 25E7. I tried to download and install these drivers directly from Intel, but nothing happened.
I have a few issues with this Mac Pro, to be written in another thread. Windows only detects 2GB out of 3GB. Need to get this resolved. And I have a number of issues on a Macbook Pro running Windows.
Top