Windows Vista installed without bootcamp

hatehereyes · September 27, 2008 9:08PM

I installed Vista into my mac pro without going through bootcamp so i don't have have an mac OS installed but now my question is..

do i just need to load a mac OS cd and boot from that and i would be able to installed over my Vista installation and install the mac OS?

mr. me · September 27, 2008 11:10PM

If you installed Windows on a Mac without Boot Camp, then you probably formatted your entire hard drive as NTFS during the installation process. You cannot install MacOS X on an NTFS-formatted volume. If you now install MacOS X, then the process will reformat the drive and destroy your Vista installation.

yama · September 28, 2008 5:55AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mr. Me

the process will reformat the drive and destroy your Vista installation.

Sounds like a pretty good deal

michael_moriarty · September 28, 2008 5:57PM

I would reinstall Mac OS X, again, on your MacBook and then use Bootcamp if you want to have Windows Vista installed, too. Less trouble this way.

kingofsomewherehot · September 28, 2008 10:15PM

How, exactly, does one get Windows to install without a BIOS??? (As I understand things, Bootcamp provides a "virtual BIOS" to allow this.

mr. me · September 29, 2008 1:18AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by KingOfSomewhereHot

How, exactly, does one get Windows to install without a BIOS??? (As I understand things, Bootcamp provides a "virtual BIOS" to allow this.

You ask a very important question. Intel-based Macs are not supposed to be Windows-compatible out-of-the-box. They have EFI firmware rather than BIOS. The EFI standard allows BIOS emulation, but Apple does not enable this mode by default. Boot Camp enables it. The only way that the OP could have installed Windows on his computer is for Boot Camp to have been run previously.

Windows Vista installed without bootcamp

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