Vista x64 on MacBook Pro
I have spent this bank holiday weekend upgrading my BootCamp Windows installation from XP to Vista. The pretty much sole reason for this was so that my full quantity of RAM would be accessible to Windows.
So I received my Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit with SP1 on Saturday and finally got it installed on Sunday. The main issue it seems was the new EFI abilities. What would happen is when I booted I would be presented with the following menu
1.
2.
Select CD-ROM Boot Type:
and the keyboard wouldn’t work. Apparently the options should be
- Normal Boot
- EFI Boot
but due to the lack of functioning keyboard this information was a bit useless. It turns out theres some issue with ISO9660 file versioning and the bootable DVD. In order to fix this I had to re-install Windows XP as I’d already nuked the Windows partition once. Once in Windows XP I followed some instructions to reburn the Vista DVD. Armed with this new DVD I was able to boot and install Vista.
Once Vista was installed I needed to download the drivers from the Mac Pro Leopard DVD which includes the required installers for Vista x64. These drivers are currently homed on RapidShare which is really annoying if you want to download the files in any quick succession. I’ll probably end up sticking them on my server when I’m at work next. If I do I’ll update this post with links to them.
Finally once they were installed the new BootCamp 2.1 Vista x64 drivers could be installed. This part had me confused for a while, I was hoping to install from the BCUpdateVista64.exe file but unfortunately this won’t install without the initial BootCamp stuff being there first.
The whole process was completed with nVidia drivers from laptopvideo2go.com.
Update: Links to the BootCamp x64 Drivers
- ZIP Archive (380.7MB)
- Drivers folder
