Windows XP on Intel Mac Confirmed

niemassacre writes "According to winxponmac.com, the contest has been won - nearly $14k to narf2006 for submitting a working solution to dual-booting Windows XP and Mac OS X on an Intel-Powered mac. A thread on osx86project.org has confirmations from several testers that the procedure works on the 17" iMac, the Mac mini, and the MacBook Pro. Many sets of pictures and videos (such as this installation video) are floating around (and mentioned in the thread). The solution itself should be posted soon." Poit! Congratulations to narf.

A lot more useful! Excellent!

[original_nickname]

Yeah this is great news! I'm a mac freak, but this makes an intel mac a great proposition as all my work stuff is Windows based!

Now all we need is for someone to make a hypervisor, or allow booting XP from within mac os without emulation, and we'll have a great system!

Does this version dual boot fully with Mac OS?

I'm sooo tempted to buy a Mac Book Pro now - my poor wallet.

So where's the meat?

[GekkePrutser]

Where can I get this? I haven't found any details or downloads yet...

MacBook Pro

[sirmalloc]

I'd almost be tempted to buy a MacBook Pro if this works without any issues. It'd be nice to boot into Windows for my day job and OSX for home usage. The only thing really stopping me is the lack of a right-click button under the trackpad. I'm sure somebody can/has come up with a software hack to use two fingers to right-click, but I don't know how annoying that would actually be without using it.

an end to speculation

[thelost]

and a amssive congratulation to Narf. This was an exciting contest to watch develop and definately brought out a lot of talent. Now the question in my mind is will this have any affect on the new intel-mac sales; Will people be keen to buy them because they can dual boot windows/mac os x on the same machine? Recently I bought a mac-mini (before the intel ones went live sadly) and I have to say, having used winxp for years after two weeks of my mac-mini on a KVM I'm just about ready to move over. I can't actually imagine many reasons for me wanting a PC any more. I'm not into gaming like I used to be, and mac os x is such a lovely user experience. I admit it, i'm a born again apple fan-boi! What exactly is the situation on driver support for someone booting winxp on a mac? That's what I am interested in, anyone got a clue?

Re:Why?

[slantyyz]

Because you're not a Mac user who lives in the Windows world. Some of us who make our money in the Windows world need to run applications that don't run on Mac... yet. I do Cognos development, and I have to provide my own notebook at work. Outside of work, I'm all Mac. Why have two notebooks when I can have my cake and eat it too? Yes, I could get a whitebox x86 notebook and run a hacked version of OSX, as the PC zealots would have it, but seeing how my PC is used for business, I'd like to stay above board. Which I can't do with an illegal version of Mac OSX running on a whitebox notebook.

soo.....

[Trelane]

if you can run Windows on a Mac now, will game developers stop porting games to Mac, since Mac users can run Windows?

Re:the real question is

[slantyyz]

What's stopping you? There are tons of people who are already booting OS X 10.5.5 on cheap commodity hardware. There's even a wiki that tells you what cheapo hardware to buy to get the best Mac experience.

Re:an end to speculation

[Luscious868]

Now the question in my mind is will this have any affect on the new intel-mac sales

I don't know but as soon as the method is posted on the web and is verfied by the community I'll be ordering an Intel iMac. I can't wait to be able to run OS X on a Mac with the ability to boot into Windows for Half Life 2 and Counter-Strike.

Re:Why?

[Total_Wimp]

1. The first guy to do something gets lots of points

2. Anybody who does a lot of work so I don't have to gets points

3. The definition of hard has less to do whith whether the technology looks challenging and more to do with how long it actually takes people to accomplish. This was not instantaneous with a bunch of people piling on working solutions at the same time. This guy stands alone after a significant period of time. That makes this "hard" in a defacto sense of the word and is definately worth some points.

4. I'm not a Mac user. I'm a Windows user. Of course Mac users love their OS. I don't. After supporting several Mac people and trying to make use of it myself, I've decided I actually dislike it quite a lot (no flames, please, this is just a personal preference). However, I _love_ Mac hardware. I've lusted after the clean, light notebooks and the "cheese grater" G5 desktops are shear design elegance. As a current Mac user, judging this by the fact that you wouldn't want to run Windows is missing the fundimental point that Windows users might like the option of buying great hardware from Apple. From my perspective, this is worth lots of points.

Add em all up and this guy can redeem his points for several rounds of beer should I ever meet him :-)

TW

Dual booting is unpractical

[kseskisator]

Dual booting is unpractical

- You have to stop everything on Mac OS (Linux, BSD, whatever) to get into Windows and vice versa.
- Data exchange between systems is horrible (common FAT32/ext2 partition? yikes!)

Being a fulltime Linux user, I know the pain. Now I have two machines sharing data over the network. That's the proper solution, unless you lack funds for a small x86 system. So, in conclusion, I don't understand what all this fuss is all about.

my 2 cents, of course.

Dell = Biggest Loser?

[gurutc]

Rather than talk about what Microsoft and Apple think, I'd love to see the marketing department at Dell today.

Perfect solution for Apple. (and me, yay!)

[guidryp]

Apple would never want to support this or even make it easy. But this is a boon. Many people such as myself who wouldn't switch previously will now consider it. In fact I am certain, my next computer will be a Conroe Mac. I predict the cool machine next year will be dual booting Mac with Conroe. Reminds of the old days when hackers liked the Amigas with x86 module that could run Dos/Amiga/Mac software all at full speed.

Why this won't negatively affect SW developers view of mac sales:
The average Mac user is never going to set up a dual boot (especially given no support, difficulties involved) so this really won't impact software developer plans (ie they won't stop making Mac software). Even those who dual boot will probably prefer to have native Mac versions of software. In the end all Macs sold will be potential buyers of Mac software. That is why this is a perfect solution, no official support and difficulties make it something only those who MUST have it will do, so it will not have any significant percentage of people using a Mac, but buying Windows software for it.

Why this is better than booting OSX on a whitebox:
Booting windows on a Mac, is a legal solution. Apple has said they are not doing anything to stop it. So you can have legal OSX and legal WinXP on the mac and keep them both updated with ease. Also the Mac which has less HW support will be running on it's intended platform. Windows should have no problem running on the same hardware. Contrast running pirate/hacked OSX on the whitebox (the only way to do it) which will always be of questionable stability and a fight to upgrade without breaking it.

Way to go guys!

Re:Why?

[PFI_Optix]

He said PC, not "license of Windows XP".

If you have a retail license of XP, it can be transferred to the Mac. If you have an OEM copy, you have to tell MS "I just had to replace the motherboard, CPU, and RAM"

Re:How can you knock flexibility and choice?

[gurutc]

About booting OSX86... Legalities aside, Apple keeps upping the arms race by changing the DRM of the application software SDKs used by developers. You can run OSX86, sure, but you'll have to constantly patch it to make anything run.

Or so I have heard.

Swiss army laptop

[HTH NE1]

Now I have two machines sharing data over the network. That's the proper solution, unless you lack funds for a small x86 system.

Why do swiss army knives sell?

Having two OS available in a single portable laptop or BYODKM-box(*) where you may not always have a network by which to connect to another machine is the point. It reduces your burden of having to carry two expensive laptops.

For an iMac, it is less compelling.

(*) by-odd-kem? be-yod-kem? by-o-dickem? beeyod-kim?

Re:I'd prefer a VPC-like solution

[swb]

Ideally there would be a tiny hypervisor that would allow you to switch between concurrent native Windows and OS X environments, perhaps with enough windowing capability that the displays for each could be scaled/tiled/etc, as well as allocating CPU/memory and other hardware resources.

Re:A lot more useful! Excellent!

[doh123]

i wouldnt say apple desired it, as they could have made it really easy. They purposefully left out backwards compatiblity in the EFI that Windows needs to run.

Re:Why?

[GMontag451]

There is an aqua driver in the works for DarWINE. Once it is operational, it will make Windows windows look like they are native mac apps.

Re:MacBook Pro

[rthille]

Turns out I work with the guy that wrote fKeys. He'd probably add the feature, or at least support you making the mods yourself (it's GPL)...

Re:Lawsuit?

[Godji]

Microsot is not happy. Do you really believe they dropped EFI booting from Vista because they couldn't do it? Yeah, right.

Say I want to buy a Mac to dual-boot both systems. All Macs come with OSX, so by buying my new Mac I've bought that too. I turn it on, check it out, and suddenly I see a better OS than Windows up and running right away. I get to like it and I never buy that Windows license and don't dual boot after all, happily knowing that I could do it if it ever became necessary.

If Windows didn't run on that Mac, I'd never buy that Mac in the first place and would most likely stick to the usual PC/Windows combination. In other words, Microsoft would get my money.

(That's of course assuming I were a typical non-geek user. If I were to speak for myself, I might hesitate about the hardware (Macs look awesome!) but the software would be clearly GNU/Linux.)

Re:So where's the meat?

[song-of-the-pogo]

engadget has links to five mirrors (at least some of which still work):

http://www.engadget.com/2006/03/16/windows-xp-on-m ac-solution-posted/ [engadget.com]

the mirrors to which the above links:

http://harrisonjordan.com/Winxponmac_0.1.zip [harrisonjordan.com]

http://leewilkins.com/share/winxponmac0.1.zip [leewilkins.com]

http://www.jerrybrace.com/Winxponmac%200.1.zip [jerrybrace.com]

http://www.geekdinner.co.uk/winxponmac0.1.zip [geekdinner.co.uk]

http://www.apple.tempex.sk/wordpress/Winxponmac%20 0.1.zip [tempex.sk]

Re:Why?

[Golias]

A lot of people use a PC at work, and most corporate seat licenses allow you to install Windows on one additional machine at home, so not everybody has to run out and buy retail Windows to be legal.

Re:Why?

[BobTheLawyer]

I've changed my motherboard three times and the re-activation has gone smoothly and automatically each time. Was I just lucky?

Re:Drive formats?

[Anonymous Freak]

The official instructions call for an HFS+ OS X partition, and an NTFS Windows partition. But, you could add a third FAT32 partition to hold common data, if you so desired. (And if you REALLY wanted to, you could copy OS X's 'Users' folder, and Windows' 'Documents and Settings' folder over to it so that your entire user data structures for both OSes were on one shared partition.)

Subvert standby/sleep mode for fast OS toggling

[FryingLizard]

It seems that one might well be able to subvert the 'standby' or 'sleep' modes of both OS's to provide fast OS switching; hit a key to get the system to slumber (i.e. save system state) then add a 'system state swap' hack where you can switch over into the slumber mode of the other OS and reawaken.

AFAIK both OS's have both 'light standby' and sleep modes, presumably sleep involves swapping the ram out to disk and even reinitialising hardware on wake, so may just be the ticket.

If this can be made to work and tweaked for speed it would seem that you'd be able to ALT-TAB between OS's with a sub-10 second delay. That'd do for me.

Hope so!
FL

Re:Why?

[fitten]

There are numerous options other than the Microsoft VMs. I agree about it being nice to have a machine that can boot into all of the OSs though. However, in my experience, dual booting sucks because what we found is that the machine will stay in one OS 99.9% of the time and the other OS is just a waste of HDD space (as well as having to switch over to apply security updates and such). We went with having one OS per machine and just having more than one machine. It worked for us because we have multiple people needing to use machines as well. Other than that, a VM package (we use VMWare) can take care of the rest.

I always found it amusing

[snuf23]

That the classic 1984 ad showed a woman wearing colored clothes running into a hall of gray zombified people smashing the video of the gray evil dictator.
And this was used to sell a product that was monochrome.
The original Apple rainbow logo highlighted the fact that Apple IIs were one of the first low cost computers to do color video displays (thanks to Woz).
After Jobs moved on to NeXt with their high res monochrome screens, I often have wondered if Steve Jobs is color blind.

Definitions:

[Anonymous Freak]

Sleep (Mac OS) / Standby (Windows): A low-power state in which the contents of main system memory are preserved, but power is cut to most other hardware, including the main processor. On resuming, the processor powers up, but with an empty cache, and the system is usable very quickly as if it was never powered down.

Deep Sleep (Mac OS) / Hibernate (Windows): A state in which the contents of main memory are saved to disk, as well as some configuration parameters, then the system is completely powered off. On turning the computer back on, the OS loader recognizes this saved state on disk, and reloads that image of main memory. The system then resumes as if it had woken from a normal Sleep/Standby. This takes significantly longer to 'wake' from than Sleep/Stanby, as it must load the contents of main memory from disk. This takes longer on systems with more memory, and with slower hard drives. (i.e. A 256 MB RAM system with a 15,000 RPM SCSI hard drive would wake many times faster than a 4 GB RAM system with a 5400 RPM ATA drive.)

It's Deep Sleep/Hibernate that could be subverted. If you could find a way to have the OS loader (the one that in this solution provides a simple graphical Apple or Windows logo,) be certain to load before the Deep Sleep/Hibernate loaders, and check for the Deep Sleep/Hibernate images on each OS' partition, it would be possible to switch between 'hibernating' OSes fairly simply. (Windows has an easy-to-access method for entering Hibernate mode; OS X is more difficult to force into this mode, but it is possible.)

That's actually a great idea. I'll have to see if the current solution happens to support this. (It may already work without having been specifically implemented, just due to the nature of the way Deep Sleep/Hibernate works. I know that in Windows, it's the OS bootloader that checks for the Hibernate image, so the Windows end should work just fine; I'm not sure if in Mac OS it's the OS bootloader that does it, or if the OS sets something in EFI that might actually break the article's hack...)