Mac Pro Windows 7 Fail

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Level 1

9 points

Mac Pro Windows 7 Fail

Hi I have a late 2007 8 core Mac Pro

it has been living mostly happily with Snow Leopard and Windows XP.

I need 64 bit windows on it, but since it's not supported on that machine I decided to take the route of installing Win 7 x86 first.

I I wanted to wipe the HD clean and do a fresh install of everything. Snow Leopard installed, but Win 7 gives me a Blue screen of death every time I tried to install it.

I decided to get a new clean hard drive for the install.

re-installed Snow Leopard on the original drive (the whole drive, not just a partition). Restored with a time machine backup to original state and got all the latest updates. So far so good.

partitioned new drive using disk utility. Windows 7 doesn't like it- won't install. First it says it must be formatted as NTFS. I do the format with the windows installer, but still no go- I get "Windows is unable to install.....error: 0x80300024"

No further explanation, so I went back and used the boot camp installer to format the drive. Windows went ahead with installation, but restarted at a certain point and ...again, Blue Screen of Death!

So, I feel like it's either a hardware problem or something to do with whatever is on my Mac that I restored with Time Machine.

Is it possibly something else? Anyone have any other ideas?

Thanks in advance!

Doug

Mac Pro 8 core, G4 Powerbook, iPhone, Mac OS X (10.4.10)

Posted on Mar 30, 2010 9:54 AM

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Answer 1

The hatter

Level 9

61,031 points

Mar 30, 2010 10:03 AM in response to dougj99

I cut my finger so I'll be brief(er).

Any drive with OS X other than the same drive, has to be removed.
If you install 7 x64 on its own, remove your other drives for now.

7 x64 needs 2008's EFI64 (UEFI 2.x), yours is EFI32.

You can modify the 7 x64 DVD when in Windows XP or 32-bit with ImgBurn, or from a VM even (free etc).

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1866970

Not sure but your video card or something else. Checked Google for error: 0x.... should help also.

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Answer 2

dougj99 Author

Level 1

9 points

Mar 30, 2010 11:19 AM in response to The hatter

Thanks for the quick reply!

So if I understand correctly, the windows install and the OSX install *have to* reside on the same drive, or they can be on different drives (but all non-system OSX formatted drives should be removed)?

I had another idea- I have a late 2009 Mac Pro as well- can I put the drive on there, install winX64 on it, then move it to the 2007 Mac Pro?

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Answer 3

The hatter

Level 9

61,031 points

Mar 30, 2010 11:44 AM in response to dougj99

Yes, I used #2 approach myself! 🙂

Windows won't install on a separate drive if it sees you have GPT/GUID format for your other drives - so remove them. And for safety.

Obviously you can't remove if it is a one drive with both, the way every other type Mac is forced to do it.

If you use Boot Camp Asst (I did not) then shutdown instead of restart so you can remove everything. And, you will need to format your target drive.
Windows 7 has a 100MB system recovery partition.
Some people have found that Windows 7 over wrote one of the Apple hidden 128MB EFI volumes instead.

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Answer 4

dougj99 Author

Level 1

9 points

Mar 30, 2010 1:43 PM in response to The hatter

Hmmm,

So then even approach #2 will require removing all the other drives from the machine being used for installation.

This all went down so easily on my other (newer) Macs. leave it to Windows to give one a false sense of security!

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Answer 5

The hatter

Level 9

61,031 points

Mar 30, 2010 4:27 PM in response to dougj99

No, leave it to definition of "supported" and all the EFI64/UEFI, the same reason you find some graphic cards work in new Mac Pro but not pre-2008; and different implementation and rules for GPT and UEFI.

Windows is really easy to work with... on the PCs I built in the last 10 months was fun actually.

The Mac Pro is a different animal than all the other single internal hdd Macs.

GPT and EFI on Windows is aimed more at Itanium and Server 2008.

As for security, MS Security Essentials (free too) gets very high marks (and great support!)

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