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Accepted
Doug Chase
Asked: 2009-05-30 09:51:25 +0800 CST

Dual-Boot Macs: What voodoo is this?

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When we manually deploy dual-boot Apple devices, this sequence of steps works well:

  1. Install OS X image over the network
  2. Use Boot Camp to prepare the disk for Windows
  3. Use a Windows XP installation disc to install vanilla Windows
  4. Stop the installation where the setup wizard begins
  5. Format the Windows partition and install our WIM image with ImageX

Why are steps 3 and 4 necessary? Why can't we just install our WIM? In fact, it would seem easier just to use Disk Utility to create a second partition and install Windows there. In this case, there wind up being three partitions, including a 200MB partition at the front of the disk.

Update: Just reproduced this again. Here are the steps so far. If anyone wants to chime in on why this behaves this way, I'd love to hear your theories.

  1. Installed OS X image
  2. Ran Boot Camp Assistant
  3. Selected "Quit and Install Later" rather than inserting a Windows disc
  4. Rebooted into WinPE
  5. Applied my WIM
  6. Rebooted to BootPicker screen
  7. Selected the Windows installation
  8. Machine reboots (to disk0s3 per BootPicker) to a black screen with blinking cursor.

Booting with the Option key held does not list a Windows volume.

In Diskpart, the volumes are all listed and the appropriate files are on C:. I checked boot.ini and ensured that it was configured correctly and set the partition as active.

deployment windows-xp boot apple imagex

5 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    The XP install disk puts the needed magic spice in the MBR on the disk. Until this is done the windows bootloader never runs.

    • 6

  2. Winclone from TwoCanoes software is what we use for deploying XP images, and it works flawlessly with no Boot Camp required.

    • 4

  3. Just ran into this today while experimenting with dual-booting using our WDS server. Had to pop in an original XP media, run the recovery console and run the fixmbr command. That worked, now if I can figure out how to bring the fixmbr command over to my PE environment...

    • 2

  4. I have now been using DeployStudio to apply both sides of these machines with great success for a couple months. Really great product and I can't recommend it enough for those of you deploying dual-boot Macs!

    • 2

  5. Are the third and fourth steps really necessary? I'm familiar with neither ImageX nor WIM, but assuming it's a bootable disk, you can just use Boot Camp to create the Windows partition, and then boot from ImageX instead of the Windows disk.

    When you reboot after creating the partition in Boot Camp, the partition is empty. It seems silly to begin installing Windows, only to format the partition later.

    • 1