baker1444

I received my new Mac Pro today and tried to install windows vista ultimate 64bit edition on it. I opened Boot Camp and partitioned my drive and followed the instructions. It said to insert my windows disk and then it restarted and began to install windows. The problem is windows is asking me if I want to install x86 or x64. So I picked x64 and then it asks me to pick a drive; I pick the newly partitioned drive and windows says I need to pick a dirve that has been formated to NTFS. Why has boot camp not done this? There was no option to do this during the initial setup. What have I done wrong? Help!!

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"Its so easy to be critical"

STRAT

Hi Rob,

i installed winXP (32 bit) on my mac pro about a year back, using bootcamp to nicely walk me through it.
Then, 2 weeks ago i purchased XP64. to install it, i first completely erased XP32 from my drive, then used bootcamp to follow instructions similar to yours. trouble is, i found out late into the whole frustrating process that no matter what any instructions say, bootcamp (even the latest version you've got) isn't windows 64 compatible.

so knowing this, we just installed XP64 as a fresh install ignoring bootcamp's help. I was lucky - the innards of my mac pro is basically 2 hard drives, so i got windows on one and osx on tuther. I'm pressuming if you only got one drive is to make a partition and install windows on that. How exactly i dont know, as i say, not too technical. but, dont try using bootcamp, it wont get you anywhere. you can set up and partition your drives through osx.

Then, you treat the 2 operating systems as 2 separate boot drives. i dont use bootcamp at all now. all it basically is is a disk swaping manager. it's not actually needed to run windows or osx. When installed, the way to switch between the 2 operating systems for booting is to start your machine and hold down the ALT key. this will then bring up a pre-boot os menu.

wish i could help more, but i'm not too technical i'm afraid anyway....

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baker1444

This apple web page says that I should be able to install windows Vista 64bit on my system.
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1846

Whats up with this?

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"Its so easy to be critical"

baker1444

Ky could you elaborate on what you mean by recreating the DVD. I did google it but I think I need a little more info to find this on google. Do you mean recreate the windows dvd? How would this fix the NTFS issue with the partitioned drive.

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"Its so easy to be critical"

baker1444

Ok I found the problem. Well its me that is the problem. You would be surprised what you can learn when you actually read the manuaul. I downloaded the Boot Camp manual and on page 13 it tells you what to do.

I had done everything correctly up to the point when I restarted the system and windows began to load up the installation. It then asked me to choose a drive and when I picked the boot camp partition it told me that it was a fat 32 partition and I need to pick one that was NTFS. Just below this dialog is a button called "Drive options (advanced)". In there you can format the partion to NTFS. Thats it! Once I did that everything went smoothly.

I hope this will help someone trying to do the same thing.

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"Its so easy to be critical"

AJLynn

Right, the old format-then-install trick