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Ramblings of a Technology Nut |
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A techno-weenie based in Victoria BC, Canada reveals how he wastes all his time on computers and electronic entertainment.
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Installing Win7 on an old Mac Mini + It has been more than 8 years since I last posted here, and I don't plan to post regularly now either. But I recently installed Windows 7 on my old (2006) Mac Mini with an equally out of date Mac OS on it (Tiger). So I thought I'd briefly point out the steps I went through in case it might help someone else in a similar situation. Excuse this post if it is a bit rambling, it's just notes and not an in-depth tutorial. If you have a newer Mac Mini or newer version of Mac OSX then you can probably skip my instructions and use Apple's official Boot Camp methods, and I'm sure it's a lot easier. But as I said, my Mini is running Mac OSX 10.4 (Tiger) and since I really only plan to use it for Windows I didn't want to have to pay for an OS upgrade simply to be able to install Win7. (But I did install all the Tiger updates that are available for 10.4 before continuing.) These instructions assume that you are planning to do a clean install of Win7 (got any old Windows files on a Boot Camp partition that you need to backup first?) and that you want to keep your Mac OS installed and be able to switch back and forth between Mac OS and Windows (ie. the Boot Camp install method). First you'll want to identify which model of Mac Mini you have, here: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3476 Only Core 2 (2007) or newer models will run 64-bit Win7. If you have an older Intel model you'll have to settle for 32-bit Win7. If your Mini is pre-2006 then you don't have an Intel Mini so you can't run Windows at all, sorry. In my case I have a Late 2006 Intel Core Duo model, so it's 32-bit Windows for me. You'll also want to make sure you have enough RAM for Win7. I believe the recommended minimum is 1 GB. I had to do a RAM upgrade, and I found this video helpful: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1UmuWdNSrk (Don't try to install too much RAM in an old Mini... for example, my model only supports 2 GB max.) To actually install Win7 I figured I'd use Boot Camp (which I had installed ages ago) but 10.4 only supports the early 1.4 Beta version of Boot Camp, and it won't even run now... it says it is expired. The official solution to that problem is to upgrade to OSX 10.5 or later. http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1799 But I discovered you can still run the 1.4 beta version of Boot Camp it if you backdate your computer's clock to a date before Sept 30, 2007: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1309 If you don't have Boot Camp 1.4, Apple doesn't have it available for download anymore but you can try to find it somewhere else. I can't vouch for these but I found a couple of torrents: http://thepiratebay.se/torrent/3869786/BootCamp_1.4_beta http://thepiratebay.se/torrent/3917990/BootCamp_1.4_App._Installer (Remember to backdate your clock when installing/using this old beta version of Boot Camp.) Using this old version of Boot Camp, create a partition for Windows. I'd suggest going for the maximum 32GB that it allows, but Apple says you only need at least 16GB for Win7-32 or 20GB for Win7-64. Then use Boot Camp to install Win7 to the partition. Even though Boot Camp only mentions older versions of Windows in the instructions, it works with Win7 too. Right at the start of the install when the Mac reboots, watch for a black screen and a prompt at the top of the screen to press the spacebar to load from CD. You need to do that to start the install from the Win7 DVD. You only need to do it this one time at the start... you should ignore the prompt when it comes up later after Win7 has already started to install. One catch... the partition that Boot Camp created is using FAT format and Win7 will only install on NTFS partitions. So there's a couple of extra steps to do a Custom install and then to use the Drive Options to format the partition during the Win7 install. I found a good set of instructions here: http://www.iclarified.com/entry/index.php?enid=2672 Don't worry, formatting using NTFS doesn't create any problems. You should also fix your computer's date/time during the Windows install. After Win7 is installed, I recommend that you install the Win7-compatible device drivers that come with newer versions of Boot Camp. You'll need to find a Boot Camp 3.0 download, like here: http://thepiratebay.se/torrent/5054638 and after installing that then use the Apple Software Updater (which also got installed) to get even newer versions of Boot Camp (3.1, 3.2, 3.3) installed. The Mac will now boot into Windows 7 by default. If you want to boot into Mac OS by default you can use Boot Camp in Windows to change the start disk setting. Another way to get the Mac to give you a choice of which OS to boot is to hold down the Option key (which is the Alt key on a Windows keyboard) while the computer boots. From there you can use the arrow keys and press Enter to pick which OS (Mac or Windows) to boot up. As you can see, I had to pull quite a bit of information together from various sources to get this working. I hope my instructions can save someone else some time and trouble.
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