Installing Windows on my Mac

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Tonight, I committed heresy – I installed Windows on my Mac.

Ironically (and this is where I need to eat a small amount of humble pie, having previously criticised the OS X interface – although I did also say that I don’t like the new Windows Vista Aero interface or KDE), when I bought my Intel-based Mac the intention was to run Windows but then I decided to give Mac OS X a spin and I quite like it. There is a big caveat though – most Mac users zealots will say that once you switch you’ll never want to go back and I don’t fall into that camp. I now run Windows XP SP2, Windows Server 2003 SP1, Windows Vista beta 2, Mac OS X 10.4.7 and SUSE Linux 10 on my various machines (some virtual, some physical) and each has it’s place. The fact that I can dual-boot between the two that I use for my desktop work is an added bonus.

Although Mac OS X, iLife 06, Microsoft Office 2004 for Macintosh and Microsoft Messenger for Mac provide enough features to cover at least 90% of my daily computing needs, I do still need to use Adobe Photoshop (and that’s not yet optmised for MacIntels) and Microsoft Money 2000(although I’m sure there’s something available for the Mac that I could use instead). I also have legacy (and partially complete) digital video that I edited using Windows Movie Maker 2.0 and I don’t have the time to re-edit it. For that reason, Windows will be on my Mac for a while.

I chose to use Apple Boot Camp (v1.0.2 Beta) – other methods of installing Windows XP on a MacIntel are available – and the rest of this post summarises my experiences of this (relatively straightforward) operation.

The first thing to note is that Boot Camp is currently beta software and although no indication is given of how long it will continue to work for, the licensing agreement does make it clear that use of the software is for a limited time only. It’s also unsupported.

The Boot Camp beta is provided in a disk image file called BootCamp102.dmg. This contains three files:

  • Boot Camp Beta Installation & Setup Guide.pdf
  • BootCampAssistant.pkg
  • Read Before You Install.app

The first of these files is an extremely readable, 17-page, document that describes the basic steps to install and configure Boot Camp; however there are some extra points highlighted below that might be useful.

Firstly, my brand new Mac didn’t have the latest firmware on it. Although Software Update said I was up-to-date from a software perspective, I also needed to download and install Mac mini (early 2006) Firmware Update 1.0.1. This successfully brought my firmware up from MM11.004B.B00 to MM11.0055.B03 but it’s also worth planning for less successful updates. Apple’s advice for dealing with failed firmware upgrades requires the Firmware Restoration CD v1.0. As this is supplied in an Apple disk image (.DMG) file, it’s probably worth burning a copy before attempting to upgrade the firmware on your Mac (unless you have another Mac available – .DMG files aren’t much help if you have blown up your Mac and need to download/burn a CD using another operating system).

Once all the prerequisites have been met, running the Boot Camp Assistant is straightforward enough, guiding the operator through the process of creating a Macintosh Drivers CD and creating a disk partition for Windows; however before Boot Camp would let me start the Windows XP installation it insisted on restarting the Mac (using the Power button), resulting in an unclean shutdown (which thankfully didn’t cause any major issues later).

The Windows XP installation is just like any other – although I noticed that it detected my external hard disk (I don’t remember any previous Windows installations recognising USB-attached drives but I may be wrong – I’ve done so many over the years that I probably don’t notice any more). I followed Apple’s advice and installed Windows on the third partition on my internal hard disk (C:) and formatted the disk using NTFS. One downside of the installation is that because the drivers for the Marvell Yukon 88E8053 PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet Controller are not present within the Windows media, there was no network available during installation to join a domain – not a problem as I could install in workgroup mode and join the domain later.

Windows XP installation on an Intel Mac Mini

After installing the Macintosh drivers and software (with one reboot required part-way through), everything was looking good; however beware that there are three unrecognised devices shown in Device Manager:

  • USB Human Interface Device (USB\VID_05AC&PID_8240\5&12F9C752&0&2).
  • PCI Device (PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_27A3&SUBSYS_00000000&REV_03\3&B1BFB68&0&38).
  • Unknown Device (ACPI\IFX0101\1).

Apple does point out that certain devices are not supported under Windows XP and for the Mac Mini that includes the Apple Remote – I suspect that’s the USB device. At the time of writing, Craig Hart’s PCI and AGP vendors, devices and subsystems identification file doesn’t recognise the PCI device although the vendor class is Intel. The ACPI device is a mystery.

I also found that the headphone socket doesn’t mute the internal speakers when running Windows (it’s fine with Mac OS X) but I can live with that.

Having installed Windows there was some basic housekeeping to be done: join my Active Directory domain (to pick up group policy for Windows updates); install anti-virus software; label the Windows partition to give it a sensible name; and set the default operating system to be Mac OS X. Finally, I installed MacDrive v6.1.4 to allow read/write access from Windows to the external hard disk that holds my data files and is formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journalled) (I previously found the 4GB file size limit with FAT32 to be too restrictive).

So that’s it. After months of talking about it, I finally have Windows running on a Mac – albeit not the Media Center Edition, and without the use of my remote control.

(My digital) life is good.

Problems connecting to Windows Server 2003 shares from within MacOS X

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Although I’ve been connecting to Windows XP clients with no issues, each time I attempted to connect to my Windows Server 2003 (SP1) server from the Finder in MacOS X 10.4.7, I was greeted with the following message:

The alias servername could not be opened because the original item cannot be found.

There was nothing wrong with the alias (it was created automatically by OS X when browsing the network) but, as Drew McLellan outlines in his blog, the issue turns out to be related to digitally-signed SMB traffic, which must be disabled.

Strangely, the option to digitally sign communications (if client agrees) didn’t seem to make any difference, so it really is necessary to disable digitally signed communications (always). Although it would seem logical to make the change via Group Policy, this is a computer setting (so is not applied to a user account) and as Macs are not domain members they are not affected by group policy either (although the policy for the target server could be set at domain level)

Beware that if editing local policies, these are overridden by site and domain-level policies; however in this case, it’s probably best to make the change only on those servers to which access is required from a computer that doesn’t support SMB signing as the need for digitally signed communications is intended to prevent man-in-the-middle attacks from occuring and disabling this represents a security risk. Further details can be found in the Microsoft Windows Server TechCenter.

Warning – buy your upgrades when you buy your Mac

Posted on By Mark Wilson

A few weeks back, I bought a Mac Mini. Because I wanted it shipped immediately (and because the upgrade prices sounded a bit steep), I stuck with the standard 80GB hard disk and 512MB of RAM and now I’m finding performance to be a little sluggish – I suspect that’s due to a lack of memory.

When I ordered the Mac, the cost of specifying 2x1GB 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM SODIMMs instead of 2x256MB was £210.01. Likewise, to take the SATA hard disk from 80GB to 120GB would cost £89.99. Those are (very) high prices for standard PC components but nothing compared to the quote I just had from the Apple Store for 2GB of RAM (with “free” installation) – over £420! Mac:Upgrades can do a similar deal (but not while I wait) for around £325 but when I look at the memory prices using the Crucial Memory Advisor Tool to I get two options that will work for me, each at a much lower price:

  1. I could drop one of my 256MB SODIMMS and replace it with a 1GB module, giving me a total of 1.25GB for just £98.69.
  2. Alternatively, I could take out all of the existing memory and add a 2GB kit (2x1GB of matched memory) for £186.81.

…so, I guess there will be bits of MacIntel all over my desk in a few days time…

Crucial recommend the matched pair option for reasons of performance (Apple say it allows memory interleaving), and if I’m going to open up my Mac (which looks to be a delicate operation) then I’d rather only do it once – that means option 2, which is only a few pounds less than the original upgrade would have been (although I will have 512MB of spare memory afterwards).

In all, for the sake of my warranty (and sanity), it looks as if the best option would have been to specify extra RAM at the time of purchase, but I guess if I do wreck the machine in the process of upgrading, the cost of replacing it is not much more than Apple would charge me for 2GB of RAM!

Rumour has it that the new Intel Core 2 Duo processors are socket compatible with my Core Duo (and quad core chips should be available by the end of the year) so a return to the operating table for a processor upgrade is a distinct possibility for the future.

How safe is your personal information?

Posted on By Mark Wilson

I recently wrote about why I’m cautious of all the hype surrounding what has become known as Web 2.0. One of my major concerns related to data security is that if my data is held on someone else’s servers, how can I control what it is being used for? Well, last week, back in the Web 1.0 world I experienced exactly the kind of issue which just underlines these concerns, when my ISP accidentally sent my account information to 1800 customers.

The first I knew was an e-mail from the Marketing Director which read (in part):

“This afternoon, whilst the marketing team was in the process of sending you a Customer Service Update, an email was sent in error to 1,800 customers. The email sent in error contained information relating to your Force9 service.The specific information was: our internal reference number, username, name, product name, subscription amount, Force9 email, alternative email, marketing preference and active status.

No address details, credit card details, payment details or phone numbers have been disclosed.

We have contacted the customers who received your information, asked them to disregard the contents and delete the email.

I would like to apologise. Although this was a result of a regrettable human error, we will be updating our systems and processes immediately to prevent this from ever reoccurring.

Once again, please accept my apologies for any inconvenience this has caused.”

Of course, my ISP should be commended for “‘fessing up” on this one – how many other organisations would have just kept quiet? But the accidental disclosure of information held about me by third parties is not an isolated incident – last year I experienced a similar problem when the Spread Firefox database was compromised. Some protection can be gained when registering with websites by using false details (watch those mandatory fields and think “why do they need my mailing address and telephone number?”); however there are practical reasons why many service providers need to be given real information.

In these days of direct marketing and (even worse) identity fraud, it seems to me that being concerned about the use of your personal details when they are supplied to a service provider is not being paranoid – it’s just common sense.