It’s no secret that I love Apple laptops but I much prefer Vista over OS X. I’ve upgraded to a MacBook Pro and wanted to see if I could get Windows Vista to install on my old 13″ MacBook without using BootCamp.
The following method worked for me using a Windows Vista DVD with Service Pack 1. I did a fresh install of OS X 10.4 Tiger before doing this. (Sorry the pictures are wonky – I’m not great at shooting screen shots with my camera.)
Your mileage may vary. Proceed at your own risk:
Insert Mac OS X Install Disc (this part should work with OS X 10.4 Tiger or OS X 10.5 Leopard discs).
Reboot. Hold down C key during reboot.
Do not start the install. From the Utilities menu, select Disk Utility.
Select your hard drive from the list and then click the Partition tab / button.
Click the Options button and select “Master Boot Record” as the partition scheme. Click OK.
From the Volume Scheme drop down list, select 1 Partition. Select MS-DOS (FAT) for the format (not that this matters since you will reformat it using NTFS during the Vista install).
Click Apply.
Reboot. Hold down the Alt/Option key turning reboot.
When the graphical boot menu appears, hit the eject button. Take out the OS X Install Disc and put in your Vista with SP1 install disc.
If a Windows DVD icon does not appear, reboot and hold down Alt/Option during reboot.
When the Windows DVD icon appears in the graphical boot menu, hit Enter to select it.
Proceed through the Vista install.
When you come to screen titled “Where do you want to install Windows,” select Disk 0.
There will be a message saying that you cannot install to that disk because it is not formatted using NTFS.
Click the Drive Options link. Click the Format link. Click OK in the confirmation dialog.
Now select Disk 0 and click Next.
The Vista installation should proceed as normal.
Once Windows is installed and loaded, insert an OS X 10.5 Leopard disc and install the Windows drivers from Apple. If you do not have access to an OS X 10.5 Leopard disc, your mileage may vary in getting all the hardware to work. (Note: I used the Leopard disc from my MacBook Pro to install the drivers for on the old MacBook. Worked like a charm.)
If this works for you, please leave me a comment here. If it didn’t work, please leave a comment describing what happened.
Oh I see now – the drivers are nothing to do with Boot Camp in OSX – you just install the drivers in Windows off the OSX disc. Still couldn’t get a tap-to-click though and the thing ran hot, so I’m giving up and going back to my ugly Dell.
You did this just to save on disc space, or was there something else that you didn’t like about Bootcamp?
@Hubert, it was because I didn’t have BootCamp. BootCamp was available as a time-limited pre-release for OS X 10.4 (Tiger). When OS X 10.5 shipped, it came with BootCamp and the beta for 10.4 was killed.
I tried this because I didn’t want to pay for OS X 10.5 just to get BootCamp. I originally bought the MacBook only because BootCamp was available as an option. Apple had not announced at the time that it would not be a free utility for 10.4 users.
I did this on a brand new macbook pro (mid-2009) to have a separate hard drive for some sensitive work stuff, and it works – for the most part. Thanks!
But, I tried to get the drivers to work using the Leopard disks and couldn’t get all the drivers (functions keys, Ctrl-alt-del to logon (used the screen keyboard for this), trackpad right-click, eject). I tried to find all the needed drivers by navigating and couldn’t find all of them. I tried running the autorun, but bootcamp had errors and quit.
Any ideas?
Ok, I figured out some things. I uninstalled an older version of boot camp (I had brought a Vista partition over from an older macbook pro to my new mid-2009 macbook pro) and then installed then ran the setup.exe file on my new Mac OSX Install DVD and everything installed.
I now can eject, Ctrl-Alt-Del, tap-to-click, rt. click, use my function keys to adjust brightness, but my USB still runs super slow. Slow like 24 hours to back up 40GB slow.
I also can’t run Windows Update which is probably a totally unrelated problem, but may be what is not letting me install all the USB drivers I need.
How’s the battery life installing Vista without BootCamp? With Bootcamp and XP or Vista, it’s horrible compared to OS X. I’m just wondering if bypassing BootCamp allows Windows Power Management to function correctly and extend battery life longer than 1-1.5 hrs.
@Jim, it’s been a while since I tested it, but battery life was comparable when I first did this. My wife has been using the MacBook for 8+ months and the battery life still seems to be decent. One tip: try downloading Vista Battery Saver.
I used your method to install XP on my MacBook Pro without having OSX, so I can use the full diskspace for my Windows installation and my files, and it worked like a charm! After installing XP, I installed BootCamp (in Windows) from my OSX install disk to get all the drivers working smoothly in Windows. So far everything works great.
I can tell you 1 thing from experience – DO NOT INSTALL BOOTCAMP! I mean it! The only thing you need are the drivers for the keyboard, wifi, Lan nic and Intel Chipset (Get it from Intel)
First the drivers that Apple provide are shit. They are not even from the manufacturer of the hardware – apple has done some modifications on them to support their features. For example the video card. It is from intel chipset and it has a very nice driver up to date from Intel website even for Windows 7. If you install Apple shit you wont be able to play even minesweeper – there is a huge graphics performance hit. I am with the driver from Intel and it works like a charm. Also a lot of people are complaynig that vista hangs and ends in a BSOD when shutting down. I had this several times. Then I reinstalled windows without bootcamp and now everything is fine.
I can tell you 1 thing for sure – Apple are providing fucked up drivers for vista just to say – look how bad Vista is – stay on Mac. Bud actually Vista is not bad – provided it has good drivers. Macs work fine on Apple OS because they are made for their hardware. How many unmodified Leopards have you seen running on a casual PC? I will let you think on that, Yavor! Cheers!
I did all what was described up above, but when I get to “Select CD-ROM Boot Type:” screen, my keyboard is dead. I have MacBook Pro with 4 gigs of RAM and quad proc.
Found a solution. It was a bad Vista x64 install ISO. One can correct it by using procedure found at this site: http://blog.aproductofsociety.org/?p=13
All the drivers can be obtained by reading stuff on following site: http://blog.andersonshatch.com/2008/04/13/macbook-pro-and-vista-64-bit/
Enjoy !
lol i did the same a while back and works great tho i install window 7 instead of vista VISTA GAY LOL but if you finding away to stop it from overheating which its not just because the core get to 50 degrees it NORMAL lol but if you really want it cooler then download a program called “input remapper” works perfectly
@Yavor: I would say that your theories that Apple’s boot camp driver packages are altered to surreptitiously sabotage Vista’s performance are a bit far-fetched, but your points that boot camp really isn’t essential are actually quite accurate.
I tried this after my new/refurb macbook failed to load OSX from a backup i made, and i got 7, XP and Vista on without a single problem – however what’s happening now is when i go online, the system crashes.
I might be lucky enough to stay within a browser for 10 minutes before it crashes the whole system.
If my luck continues, it will unfreeze and i can get another 3 minutes before it locks up, otherwise i’m presented with the blue screen & a crash dump message.
Do you think maybe within OSX’s updates, there is something that corrects this problem? The laptop was fine with OSX, just with any version of windows it’s giving me hell.
Do you still have OS X installed at the same time? Or is it on a different partion (i’m guessing partion 1)? As you can see, I’m new to this.
Tyler, OS X will not be installed after this. If you want OS X and Windows, you need to use BootCamp.
somebody help me
when i insert the windows disc after pressing alt while rebootin my cd is ejected n i just can c a black cursor n the white screen
Technically, can I use my Macbook Pro 15″ Leopard Disc and overwrite the OSX 10.4 on my Macbook without a license and then run Bootcamp from the Macbook and install Windows 7?
Thanks for the great details. I’ve successfully used the method to put Windows 7 on my Intel MacMini and iMac.
I’m going to do this, but I’m going to partition my hard drive.
I can then install OS X on one, and Windows on the other, right?
See, my problem is that I’ve been running windows on a virtual machine and it doesn’t take advantage of my macbook’s graphics card. It instead uses “simulated” 3d graphics, w/e that means.
My question is: Will my plan work? Can I have my cake AND eat it too?
Because I still want osx. I just want to boot into osx or windows separately. trick the computer into thinking it’s two people?
Travis, if you want both OS X and Windows, you should use BootCamp rather than the technique documented here.
That’s what I don’t want to do.
Does Bootcamp take advantage of my computer’s graphics card?
Because I have VMWare Fusion
and it doesn’t.
It uses a simulated graphics card that can’t compete with the Macbook’s, and I’m in college for video games. I have to have 3d.
So yea… Will it work? I can partition my hard drive and install both, right?
Because, like I said; if bootcamp doesn’t use my graphics card then I don’t want it.
@ Travis
Windows in Bootcamp uses your GPU normally. It’s totally different to running a VM which uses a “virtual” GPU taken from the VM’s memory.
Windows in Bootcamp is not virtualized, it runs as normal – Vista runs very well on my Macbook.
OH!
Well.
That’s my only beef with VMware.
If Bootcamp uses my graphics card then…
AWESOME!
Wth’s the point of VMware then?
lol
The problem I am having is that I cannot read from the OSX Tiger 10.4 disc in Windows. It seems that 10.5 and higher is much more adaptable to installing Windows on a Mac.
Is there any way to create this Mac Driver disk without bootcamp (as the old version of bootcamp is no longer avaliable).
seriously, i want to know.
what the hell’s the point of VMware then?
VMWare and Parallels Desktop integrates Windows Vista or 7 with MacOS X
Hey guys, i got a bit of a problem.
I got a macbook through work and dont have the osx disk. (dont worry, i DO have mac admin pass.)
Without knowing i needed the disk, i created a second partition (through bootcamp) and installed windows xp.
Using the mac startup utilities menu, i told it to reboot on the windows partition. Now i cant get back to the mac partition. windows cant even find it.
Pressing apple+s on startup does nothing.
Pressing F8 gets you into windows advanced starup options.
Please help me!!
Mark
Worked a treat for me on a new MacBook Pro (or whatever it’s called) using leopard 10.5 and Vista SP1 DVDs. An earlier bootcamp install was giving a BSOD on shutdown, and wifi was shonky.
This has sorted it out nicely – thanks Derek!
I am slightly concerned by a couple of posts here saying that the OSX install disk Vista drivers are a bit dodgy. If that’s the case, where can we locate better drivers for Vista, if at all possible?
When I click apply to partition in the first part, it says that partitioning will permanently erase all the data from the disk, meaning my current hard drive… is that supposed to pop up? And will it really delete my hard drive?
for me everything seemed to be fine until I start to format to FSNT: when it gets to 2% it does not proceed any more. (I have been waiting for more than 30 minutes now)
Any hint?
Thanks, Jacopo
Mark, just press OPTION while restarting. It will present you with a GUI to select the OS you want.
For me it is entirely different! because i don’t have leopard installation disk and want install windows 7 on my macbook without using boot camp.
Here, what i did in my macbook late 2006 edition.
Step 1.
Open you Tiger, go to terminal window, type the command
“sudo diskutil resizevolume disk0s2 50G” (if you have one partition, even if you don’t know, just carryout, since always macbook have one System partition, one EFI Partition)
the above command shrink you mac OS X system partition to 50GB, if you want to keep your mac OS X system partition more space, simply modify the numeric part like “XXG”.
Step 2.
if it is successful (it must succeed to carry on further), then reboot your system using any Ubuntu live boot CD, for that you have to press & hold “C” before boing/bang sound in the boot sequence. (Forced boot from CD/DVD). After boot, go to system preference, administrative tools menu, click disk utility, Create new partition in FAT/NTFS file system and exit (if you want more than one partition, you can create here, but need only on NTFS/FAT partition)
The Step 2 is obsoletely necessary since, windows 7 / vista is not capable of creating partition in EFI (GUID boot) systems.
if both step 1 & 2 is success then you are ready to proceed installing windows 7 / Vista / XP (prefer windows 7, since, it automatically recognize most of the mac hardwares, including Airport, nothing but WLAN)
shutdown the ubuntu, it will automatically eject CD and it will ask to press enter key to shutdown. now put your windows boot DVD into drive & proceed to shutdown.
Step 3.
turn on the macbook while holding Alt/Option Key before boing/bank sound for 5 to 10 seconds and release. you will come up with graphic interface, now select windows CD icon. Then the windows 7 installation will begin. If the above procedure not working then hold down the “C” key while turn on your mac (Forced boot from CD/DVD??)
In installation menu select custom (Advanced), then select the FAT/NTFS partition we created in ubuntu, if if is NTFS no need to format, if it is FAT then format in NTFS file system. hereon everthing else is windows straight forwards procedure. when installation complete the windows 7 installation reboot. but don’t expect the macbook straightaway boot in windows 7, so prepared to holddown the alt/option key to boot windows, now you can see 2 harddrive icon in boot menu select the one says “windows” & complete the installation of windows 7 and again it will reboot and press & holdown for few seconds the option key and boot windows.
Now it will prepare windows for first time use.
Straightaway go to control panel press windows update. you may have some updates in optional component, like hardware, intel board infs etc, not necessarily the language component. complete it.
That’s it. you have working windows 7 OS in Mac.
Ps. some hardware like sound may not work, but graphic, Wi-fi (WLAN), LAN will perfectly work (95% of the hardwares). you can always google it for work around.
You always to press option button to enter windows 7, otherwise your system automatically boot in Mac OS X.
hi Derek!
Could you help me I have a macbook pro and once I deleted mac osx which was originally installed when I bought it. I would very like you to help me. I would like to install mac osx and vista as well with boot camp but once I could do that but I forgot how and when I try it and the end put my vista and would like to install it it says that NTFS could not installed or something like that.
I would be more than grateful if you could tell me step by step how should i do it.
Hi Derek,
I installed like the way you said to, but on start up, between the white screen and the windows start up screen, is get a black screen with the flashing white bar on the top left hand corner (similar to what you would see on command prompt). Is this normal? It’s annoying because it seems like there is an added delay for no reason.
Hi,
I am lil confused with this. If I use MBR scheme would I still be able to install OSX on it or not? I guess OSX doesnt work on MBR partition table. It has to GUIDED or Apple. Please help.
Billy,
You need GPT “GUID Partition Table” to use OSX. You need MBR for windows. To run both you need a bootloader like refit. Instal refit from within OSX then you can access both OSX and Windows partitions.