Vista on MacMini Intel Duo Installing and Upgrading Vista Discuss Vista on MacMini Intel Duo in the Windows Vista forums; This note has been posted on winvistaforums.com and is repeated here for the help of those using this site but not necessarily the former. I have a Mac Mini ...

[Raymond Zachary]

This note has been posted on winvistaforums.com and is repeated here for the help of those using this site but not necessarily the former.

I have a Mac Mini Intel Duo 1.67 GHz running Tiger as its primary OS. I decided to try Boot Camp, downloaded from Apple, to see if I could install XP as a trial and found it to be successful. My next challenge was to see if I could upgrade XP to Vista.

Here are some of the considerations:

1. XP will run in a FAT partition which means that the Mac OS partition can see and write to the Windows partition and vice-versa. Therefore, when one installs XP one is inclined to format the XP partiton as FAT, the same as the Mac OS partition. This is fine as long as one has no intent to upgrade to VIsta. On the other hand, if one intends to upgrade to Vista, one should format the Windows partition as NTFS which is acceptable to XP and required by Vista.

2. If one has XP Professional and Vista Home Premium, one is not allowed to upgrade to Vista. However, the option of a clean install is provided and the XP software is stored in a folder called Windows Old.

3. Since Vista is on a partition which is NTFS and Mac OS is on a partion formatted FAT they cannot communicate. FAT can see but not write to NTFS. NTFS cannot see FAT. The good solution is a Windows program called MacDirve7 from MediaFour.com. This program caused the Mac partition to appear with complete read and write access.
So while you can pull data from the Windows partition to the Mac partition you cannot push it. But with MacDrive7 you can push and pull from the Windows side.

4. One should create the Windows partition to be at least 20GB to give yourself some room for applications and data.

5. When one installs XP the first thing you do after the successful installation of XP is to install the Mac drivers from the CD which you created when you first launched Boot Camp in the first part of this adventure. When you upgrade to Vista or do a clean install of Vista DO NOT reinstall the Mac Drivers. They are already there and if you try to reinstall them something unknown FAILS. You do not necessarily know what it is but you don't want that. You will have to go back to Start Over on the whole process.

6 You can install your applications just as you would if you were on a Dell or HP machine. As far as I can tell you have a Vista machine and you cannot tell you are on a Mac.

7. To eject a disk when you are in Mac OS you normally press the key in the topmost far right key on the keyboard. This sometimes works in XP and Vista. On the other hand, if it doesn't, go to My Computer, click on the drive, and then go to File>Eject. Works every time.

8. To go back and forth between Mac OS and XP or Vista simply restart and hold the Option Key down until you get the choice which you select with the ARROW keys followed by ENTER. When the screen goes BLACK be sure and press the Option key so you don't miss the opportunity. The system seems to favor starting up in Mac OS but if one is in Windows, I think one can override that by going to System Startup options and setting different priorities. I have done this in a machine that has XP on one partition and Vista on the other, but I have not tried it in the Mac.

[Znod]

Great post Raymond. And, . We are very glad you are here. I have used MacDrive many times--great program; it and Sharepoints. Using MacDrive, my Laptop even allows connecting my Mac via Firewire Target Disk Mode.