Near the end of october I wanted to install Vista on my Mac Pro, using Bootcamp of course. The reason is that I need a Windows machine at home to watch speedruns on it, so it seemed like a nice thing to try.
Back then, I was unable to even get setup going: Whenever you selected a partition that’s not the first partition on the drive (where OS X must be). The installer complained that the BIOS reported the selected partition to be non-bootable and that was it.
Yesterday, Apple has released another EFI update which was said to improve compatibility with Bootcamp and to fix some suspend/resume problems (I never had those)
Naturally, I went ahead and tried again.
The good news: Setup doesn’t complain any more. Vista can be installed to the second (or rather third) partition without complaining.
The bad news: The bootcamp driver installer doesn’t work. It always cancels out with some MSI-error, claims to roll back all changes (which it doesn’t – sound keeps working even after that «rollback» has occurred). This means: No driver support for NVIDIA card of my MacPro.
Even after trying to fetch a vista compliant driver from NVIDIA, I had no luck: The installer claimed the installation to be successful, but resolution stayed at 640x480x16 after a reboot. Device manager complained about the driver not finding certain resources to claim the device and that I was supposed to turn off other devices… whatever.
So in the MacPro case, I guess it’s waiting for updated Bootcamp drivers by Apple. I hear though that the other machines – those with an ATI driver are quite well supported.
All you have to do is to launch the bootcamp driver installer with the /a /v parameters to just extract the drivers and then you use the device manager and point it to that directory to manually install the drivers.
gnegg 