Windows 7 Will not boot

[WanderingOak]

I am trying to help my neighbor install Windows on a 24" 2.66 Intel Core Duo iMac using Boot Camp. So far we haven't had any luck. We've tried using XP, and Windows 7 Home Premium (both 32 and 64 bit ISO downloads). Invariably, when we get to 'Start Installation' in the Boot Camp Setup Assistant, the computer spits out the DVD after rebooting, and boots into OSX normally. This also happens when we try to boot with the rescue DVDs that came from Microsoft as well.

 

I've done a bit of research, and have been told that the MBR may need to be patched in order for Windows 7 to boot. That lead me to johnsock's AHCI Enabler , which at first glance looks like it might work, but after a read through the documentation it looks like it probably won't work for this issue.

 

Before i start looking for other solutions (which may or may not cause even worse problems), I think I should probably work on defining exactly what the problem is to begin with. So, has anybody else ever seen this problem? Is this a boot camp issue, a hardware issue, or a Windows issue?

[syneii]

Have you tried holding the Command key down as the laptop reboots?

 

Someone I know that has Win7 installed on a macbookpro has to hold Command down while the system boots up to get to a boot menu which lets him choose between Windows and OS X.

 

I haven't been able to install windows via Boot Camp personally, so I probably can't help much, but that is something that came to mind.

 

I got Win7 SP1 x64 installed through refit and a bootable USB stick with Win7 media on it, so when I restart I see refits boot menu right away. However if you choose to go that route see my thread on what driver issues I was able to resolve, and which I still haven't, that's the primary down side. The results are not the same for everyone either, some people install the drivers themselves and everything is good - and for others things just don't do right.

 

So long as you can get everything going through Boot Camp you shouldn't have issues. The guy I know with Boot Camp'd Win7 has no driver issues, so apparently there's something I'm over looking in trying to manually configure everything.

 

Just as FYI, my reason for having to go around Boot Camp is that my DVD drive is currently messed up and Boot Camp refuses to read from any other devices other than the DVD drive.

[WanderingOak]

Well, I figured it out, somewhat. After many tries I become so frustrated, that I decided to check to see if the 2.66 iMac would boot from a DVD. I plugged his install disk in, hit 'c' and watched in fascination as the computer spat the disk back out as it booted normally. I tried to do the hardware test (boot holding down the 'd' key), only to have the computer boot normally again. I was all set to grab the iMac and drive 90 miles to the nearest Genius Bar, when I looked at the 10 year old Apple extended keyboard (from an old G4 'sawtooth' tower) and the Wacom Bamboo tablet and mouse combo. From somewhere deep in my alcohol-drenched subconscious, I remembered a tidbit of information back from who knows when (OS8, 9?), where I was told that if a Mac didn't boot as expected, remove everything extraneous and make sure it has all of the original hardware in place. I managed to find the original keyboard and magic mouse, and voilà, the machine booted into Windows and installed exactly the way it was supposed to.

 

Of course Windows 7 insisted that 'boot camp' from the OSX install disk was 'untested' and a 'potential virus', but I hit 'accept' and 'allow' a dozen or so times, until the silly creature had been beaten into submission and had all of the Apple drivers installed. I had to dig deep into the Windows control panels to find the boot camp control panel (No Habla Windows. Where the bloody blue blazes is the 'system tray'?), but I was eventually able to set the elegant, well designed work of art (reduced by Windows into Dr Frankenstein's beast) to boot into Snow Leopard as a default.

 

Of course, the first boot into Snow Leopard resulted in a broken magic mouse, which could move the cursor, but couldn't click on anything- not even a menu. I hit the power switch, only to have the machine fall asleep, and wake up again, still with a busted mouse. After a dozen or so attempts to reboot (I was about to rip the power cord out of the wall- if this was a laptop I'd have to yank the battery out), the Beast finally did what it was told and rebooted, with a working mouse.

 

I've since put the extended keyboard and Wacom tablet-mouse back on the computer. I haven't checked to see if it will actually boot into Windows with that combination (hold 'option' key during reboot). Since it wouldn't boot from CD with them before, I am not optimistic. The original keyboard is miniscule ( no numeric keypad, etc), while the magic mouse is a kludge (the trackball breaks if your fingers aren't perfectly clean), so I am hoping that both will work. Then again, I'm not going to hold my breath.

[WanderingOak]

Well, the machine boots into Windows fine with the aftermarket keyboard and mouse. It could be that reseating the keyboard and mouse cables squared everything away. There are still a few minor issues. Snow Leopard can see the Windows partition fine. It can read it but not write to it. However, Windows can not see any of the Mac drives. Not the partition on the internal drive, or the two external firewire drives. If I dig deep enough into the control panels, I can verify that they can be seen, but the only option that I am given in Windows is to reformat as NTFS. I'm sure that there are third party utilities that allowed Windows to see HFS+ partitions, but I was under the impression that Boot Camp was supposed to do that. We do have a 16 GB thumb drive formatted Fat 32 that we can use to swap files from Mac to Windows, but I'd rather have direct access to the Mac partitions. Any ideas on how to make this work?