Bounty For Booting XP on the Intel iMac

An anonymous reader writes "The race is on. You can try to get the bounty for booting Windows XP on iMac. At this moment there is $2773 waiting for the winner. However several people have brickified their iMacs when playing with EFI." I imagine those tech support calls are hysterical ;)

Charity Suggestion:

From TFA:

If it is determined impossible to boot Windows on the Mac by March 23, 2006, all donations will be donated to a charitable cause (please send suggestions to [e-mail]).

Here's a suggestion for a charity...how about a charity for all the poor saps who've hosed their iMacs trying this stunt? ^_^

I suggest the Free Software Foundation

in a twist of irony. Or the EFF.

Re:I suggest the Free Software Foundation

> Shouldn't it be illegal for a computer vendor to force you to only use a
> particular OS on your computer?

Apple isn't forcing anybody to run OS/X. I'm quite sure people buying Macs do it of their own volition. Furthermore I'm pretty sure Linux will be booting on these machines quite soon, this should answer this worry.

On the other hand there is no requirement on hardware manufacturers that their machines must be made to boot Windows, just because they have an x86-compatible chip inside.

Re:I suggest the Free Software Foundation

On the other hand there is no requirement on hardware manufacturers that their machines must be made to boot Windows, just because they have an x86-compatible chip inside.

EXACTLY!!! Most people don't get the idea that two computers can be completely different even if they have the CPU in common. Some examples:

- Z80: Game Boy, Game Gear, TI graphing calcs, and CP/M machines all have the same processor but totally different architectures.

- Motorola 680x0: Classic Macs, Amigas, and 68k-based TI graphing calcs are all different

- PowerPC: Power Macintoshes and PREP machines are incompatible.

Perhaps the x86 Macs are PC-compatible, but nothing says they HAVE to be. Just look at history.

Re:I suggest the Free Software Foundation

When did they remove BIOS? Macs have never used BIOS. People haven't bought a computer that Apple have come round and pulled a chip out of. They designed a computer that doesn't use BIOS... just like all the other computers they've been designing. In what sense can they be said to have removed something that was never there in the first place?

Re:I suggest the Free Software Foundation

More like the choice of using unleaded petrol or diesel in your car, or a particular tire size.

You can use the other if you like, just don't expect it to work as well anymore if at all.

The fault is with Windows AFAIK not supporting the hardware anyway, which is hardly surprising when it was written several years before Apple announced that they'd be moving to Intel.

I'm sorry

Who would want to boot Windows XP normally?

Re:I'm sorry

I don't know sounded fun so I tried it .
But a little boot on the iMac's stand ,then proceeded to use it to kick a Windows XP CD around the room.
Unfortunately due to a technicality , I can't claim the prize money.
I assume though I am the first person to boot windows with an iMac

Brickified?

Not to be too picky, but the correct word, I believe, is "bricked". Although whether there's an actual dictionary definiton of the word in this context I do not know.

Re:Brickified?

It's a cromulent Neologism

Re:Brickified?

Then wouldn't it be "to embricken"?

Re:Brickified?

embricken

It could be one of those detached (or whatever it's called) German verbs...

Wann hast du deine iMac emgebricken?

Die iMac verbindung bricken em.

Re:Brickified?

Enbrickened.

Fracked.

Made to exhibit a Brickish form.

Relegated to brickhood.

Elevated to the Platonic ideal of "Brick".

Invited to join the elite group of formerly functioning Von Neumann machines now inculcated in the eternal, static realm of Brick. (FFVNMNIRSRB: pron. Fuff-van-man-IRS-Rub)

DEAD BRICKED.

Seriously, kids. Do try this at home. It is big, it is clever. And it will give us a laugh. Let's see you try and do that with your $3000 Alienware rig.

Muhahahahaha.

Re:Brickified?

That Mac isn't dead... its pining for the fjords..

Re:Brickified?

Not to be too picky, but the correct word, I believe, is "bricked". Although whether there's an actual dictionary definiton of the word in this context I do not know.

This is a new low for a grammar nazi... trying to correct a word that isn't even a word. Brilliant.

the opposit

I would prefer to see booting osx86 on a non intel mac then ruining a perfectly good mac with xp.

Re:the opposit

The "restore" DVD contained a normal Mac OS X 10.4 installer

It has recently been established that the "normal" Mac OS X 10.4 DVD which comes with the new iMac will not work on other Macs.

I believe that's what the grandparent post wast bitching about.

Bricks are useful too

[...]However several people have brickified their iMacs when playing with EFI.

Aha, but don't worry, just ask these nice people [netbsd.org] to add bricks to their existing set of architectures [netbsd.org] ;-)

Don't they have this backwards?

What I want is to boot MacOS on my PC. How about a bounty for that?

Re:Don't they have this backwards? Here you go

Installing and booting OSX on PCs. [profit42.com]
I expect to receive my rightfully earned $2500 by midnight.

No, because...

- there is no legal way to do it (there is also currently no way to buy a standalone copy of Mac OS X for Intel, even if you choose to ignore the license agreement)

- the Mac OS X license agreement specifically states that Mac OS X can only be installed on a single Apple-branded computer

However,

- the Windows license agreement allows for this

- it is legal to purchase a license for Windows and use it on any machine desired, including an Intel-based iMac

Microsoft is a software company. Apple is a hardware company.

You Just Have to Wait

for Apple's Windows based Mac [bbspot.com] later this year.

No EFI backwards compatibility module on iMacs

Therefore getiing XP to boot natively won't happen. There is still a chance at booting Windows Vista though, as it supports EFI. The only thing to overcome is the ACPI requirement that Vista has. The intel chip and mobo inside the iMacs stupport ACPI, but of course it has been removed from Apple's version of EFI. Find a way to get ACPI support onto the Mactel's EFI, and you should be able to have a dual boot config with Windows Vista.

UNBRICK your Intel iMac

From Dave Schroeder, posted to http://nak.journalspace.com/?cmd=displaycomments&d cid=407&entryid=407 [journalspace.com]

By following these steps, the iMacs that had difficulty with certain EFI modules appear to have been restored to a functioning state:

1. Disconnect the internal hard disk
2. Disconnect the iMac from AC power
3. Plug in AC while holding the power button
4. Power up the iMac and zap NVRAM (cmd-opt-P-R)
The hard disk can be reformatted and the operating system restored.

Re:Plug in AC while holding the power button???

Um, I'm one of the people who originally was left with an Intel-based iMac that would no longer boot. Both the blog's owner (Nakfull Propaganda) and one of the other posters in the comments also had the exact same issue when attempting to load EFI modules that presumably were unsupported by, or otherwise disagreed with, Apple's EFI implementation.

The steps I posted apparently reset something related to the NVRAM or firmware in the machine, and allow the machine to be revived (albeit after formatting the hard disk). Considering my contact information is everywhere, and I posted all of my contact details in every blog post I made, it's ridiculously easy for people to contact me and/or see who I am and what I do.

Re:UNBRICK your Intel iMac

Um, you don't.

Sorry the instructions weren't more specific.

After you plug in the iMac while holding the power button (at this time that appears to be the equivalent of the old PMU/motherboard reset) and zap the NVRAM (probably not required after the reset, but I included it because that was in the series of steps I performed), you can reconnect the hard disk. You can then boot from the DVD installation media, reformat the drive, and restore the OS.

You don't disconnect or reconnect the hard disk while the machine is running.

Why? Seriously

I've always heard that I would "need" Windows for something or other. In my business it seemed prudent to own/install a copy of Software Windows and so a bought a succession of versions starting in the early 90s.

In more than 10 years of having a copy of Windows, I've needed it all of 3 times (using content on 2 MS-only CD-ROMs and some MS-Access work). Now I don't even need the emulator -- I bought a Pentium-III laptop at a garage sale for $10. It's sat unused now for 3 years.

I can understand the "because its there challenge," and I suppose some people really need to play PC-only games (I don't), but otherwise putting Windows on a Mac seems like a waste of good hardware.

Re:Why? Seriously

Right, because no one else has other software needs than yours.

Re:Why? Seriously

Turn your argument around. Nobody really "needs" a Mac in the first place. We could get everything we need to get done on a standard Windows PC, but instead we buy Macintoshes because we *want* to, not because we need to.

Surely you will admit that there are some very popular Windows packages that have not been ported to the Mac. As well about a million inhouse and vertical software packages designed for Windows. A lot of people in the Mac community see this as something that would be legitimately useful to them, and not just "because it's there". They're doing this because they think it would add value to their Mac system.

There are many reasons.

If you do webdesign, you need to check your pages in Explorer.
If you do application software, and your users are on windows.
If you do embedded software, and the dev kits are windows only.
If you do electrical design, you will probably need to run OrCAD.
If you do drafting, you will probably need to run AutoCAD.
If you teach and your school requires a specific application for grades.

Since MS Office was ported to the Mac, most business people will probably be able to get by without using windows. For graphics work, all the professional tools are also on the Mac, so they can get by just fine as well. There are also many good audio tools as well, although most professionals use a mix of Mac and Windows software (plus that one that boots up without a seprate OS).

However for many people, they really don't have that option. Even if there are replacements apps on the Mac that are as good or better than the windows based industry standards, compatibility with others pretty much forces you to have a copy around.

Xen and Vanderpool

Does the "Core Duo" processor include the Vaderpool virtualization extensions.
And if Xen is able to use Vanderpool to transparently support WindowsXP/2003 then, would using Xen be the best way to go, with out having to deal with the Boot issue.

How to report a brickified iMac to Apple

1.Walk it into any Apple store or Apple authorized repair shop.
2. Tell them your mac stopped working.
3. When they ask you for the symptoms, tell them it showed a spining ball in many colors, like a rainbow. Then it beeped. Then it told you to reboot in many languages.
4. When you rebooted it, it refused to power up.
5. The proper answer to any probing questions is "uh, I don't know."

Under any circumstances are you to give the impression that you know more about macs than the guy taking your repair order. If the contents of the drive are an issue, take the drive out, connect it to another machine and delete the partitions. Check out the "user installable parts" document for your mac, it will tell you the exact procedure for pulling a drive without voiding the warranty. For the first generation iMac G5 it even tells you the color of the 3 screws that you need to remove, I bet that has not changed with the Intel version.

Re:How to report a brickified iMac to Apple

Yes, lets advocate fraud. Good one.

Re:How to report a brickified iMac to Apple

Or alternatively, you could call them and tell them what actually happened. That way they can diagnose the fault, and fix it. In the event that the person you talk to is someone who reads Slashdot and is therefore convinced that someone experimenting with different commands on their computer is actually doing something illegal, immoral, or just "against the Man(tm)" and that Apple is perfectly within their rights to not honour a warranty under such circumstances, you ask to speak to their supervisor.

There is no reason why typing commands at a prompt should completely brickify a computer. Result in data loss? Yeah. Mean you have to reinstall the OS? That's fine. But render a computer utterly incapable of being restored to a usable state by the user? Absolutely not. We're not talking about plugging the AC cable into the Firewire slot here, or dropping it from the top of the Empire State Building, we're just talking about experimenting with the subsystem that boots the computer in order to try to, legitimately, boot another operating system.

This isn't a slam against Apple here. I suspect these machines do, indeed, have a by-pass somewhere in them to restore the firmware (there's already a supposed fix circulating which may actually be the solution), and there are plenty of companies that also make it relatively easy to brick their systems (would it be too fucking much to add a $5 ROM to your $800 laptops that contains a "good" version of the firmware in case there's a problem with the flash?); far from it: I have great difficulty believing Apple would refuse to honour a warranty over such an issue, and I suspect, ultimately, they'll have a KB article up soon enough ensuring users can fix the issue themselves. In the event they do not, I'd be surprised if they're not seeing this as a design flaw, rather than a user issue.

OH NO, The slashdotters cometh.

I just got a message from a friend of mine saying I have been /.ed . Now my life is complete

Tech support brickfied call

However several people have brickified their iMacs when playing with EFI. I imagine those tech support calls...

UserX: Hi, is this Apple tech support?

Tech Support Operator 213453098: Yes, how can I help you?

UserX: Well, I was trying to win a contest by booting Windows XP on my iMac and then totally brickified it.

Tech Support Operator 213453098: Oh that's too bad, can you please start from the beginning?

UserX: Okay, I had XP copied to a disc, I put it in the iMac and fiddled with the EFI a bit to boot XP and all of a sudden I had a screen with a bunch of letters and numbers on it. I tried to hardboot it and get back OSX, but it failed...so I brickified it.

Tech Support Operator 213453098: So you corrupted your iMac to the point will it will not boot at all?

UserX: No, I got so mad I just threw a brick at it - now it's just a pile of sparking wires and smoking plastic.

Tech Support Operator 213453098: Please hold, let me transfer you to our anger management department. You estimated wait time is... thirty-five .... minutes. Have a great day, sir.

Small bills please...

You can already boot XP on your Intel Mac [openosx.com].

Bounty & booty

I actually first thought the topic was "Get booty for bounting XP..." Now there's a challenge for nerds!

"I imagine those tech support calls are hysterical

...you insensitive clod!

$2773 for bounty? Try...

$1337. And have them write the check entirely in Leetspeak.

Linux + VMware

So what about booting Linux and start VMWare directly after Linux boots?

Pirates want in on this

A bounty for booty ye say?

ARRRRRRRRRRR!

booting linux

Frankly, booting Linux on one of these is a whole lot more important to me than booting Windows.

Speaking of Which...

Has anyone gotten Linux booting on one of those things yet? I expect it'd be a lot easier, and being able to dual boot between Linux and OSX is a lot more interesting to me than being able to dual boot between OSX and Windows. Maybe not interesting to anyone else, but certainly to me.

Bricking A Camel

Is that anything like brickifying an iMac? Don't want the iMac sucking mud.

dead or Alive

Is that one of those Clint Eastwood 'dead or alive' bounties?

Brickify = Poor Design

have brickified their iMacs...

If you can so easily brickify your Mac into a difficult-to-impossible to recover state, then the Mac is poorly designed and needs improvement.

Excellent

This is a very good idea. Clearly, there are not enough machines that run Windows XP right now; any effort to increase its use is certainly for the best.

Unless the firmware has a BIOS compatibility layer

Good luck getting XP to boot if the firmware is a true EFI (legacy-free) implementation. If it has a BIOS-compatibility layer (I forget exactly what it's called) - which is basically just a BIOS plunked into the firmware so it can support the legacy BIOS interrupts, you may be in luck. Otherwise you'll have to do some pretty major hacking of the firmware OS interface.

Article: Will Macs boot Windows?

EFI isn't the only problem for the new Macs to run Windows. I wrote an article that looks at a range of problems: http://www.roughlydrafted.com/Jan06.IntelMacsWin1. html [roughlydrafted.com]

Bricked your iMac? That's nothing...

When I was working on the ia64 port of linux back in 2000, I bricked a prototype 'Lion' quad ia64 server with a small, seemingly harmless EFI application that happened to hit a bug in the (still beta) EFI firmware for the machine. It was a $40,000 fix. Oops.

iMacs are small potatos. :)

VMWare?

Wouldn't it be fairly easy to port VMWare to OS X x86? Then running XP would be much less complicated...

Tech Support Call

This is a really great story. Here is my example Apple tech support call:

Apple: Hello, Apple Tech Support this is iMac, how can I help you?
Nerd: My new iMac Core Duo won't boot up.
Apple: Ok, could I get your name and telephone number?
Nerd: ...Ok (gives name and telephone number)
Apple: Hmmm....
Nerd: What?
Apple: Have you called about problems with this computer before?
Nerd: Yes. It's been very buggy.
Apple: I'm showing 10 other tech support calls and 10 replacement iMac's sent to you.
Nerd: Yeah, like I said they are really buggy machines.
Apple: You know what? Do I look stupid? DO YOU THINK WE WEREN'T TOLD THIS WOULD HAPPEN?
Nerd: Well I just....
Apple: (interrupts) Stop messing with the EFI!!!
Nerd: But I WANT to boot Windows!! How else am I supposed to do it?
Apple: I think we need to start seeing other people.
Nerd: What... WHY?
Apple: I need some space, and I feel like you can never be honest with me.
Nerd: I'm honest with you most of the time....
Apple: It's over guy, get a new girlfrield. Maybe you can go back to Dell, I hear she's available.
Nerd: But iMac you are so sexxxy!! You're breaking my heart!
Apple: No, you are literally breaking mine. My motherboard > you. (click)
(Nerd goes into corner, cries, and calls Dell.)
Dell: Hello you have reached Dell Tech Support.
Nerd: My iMac just dumped me, I need a friend....

Does anyone remember loadlin?

The approach I would take would be to boot a Linux that hosts a variation of the Linux BIOS and then try to use that to boot WinXP.

What a great scam!

Now I'm not suggesting that this is what is actually happening, but it would make a great idea for a scam. All you have to do is solve some "hot" technical issue e.g. running WinXP on an Intel Mac and then post a heartfelt plea on the internet for somebody to do the same thing, putting up some money and adding that other people are free to donate their money to get the answer too.

Wait a bit until you have the donations roling in nicely and then use your alternative e-mail account to submit the solution. You get to keep all the donations. In the event that somebody else manages to solve the problem, some e-mail header and log fakery will make it look ike your entry just got in first.

I'd like to reiterate that I have no grounds whatsoever to supose that this is what is actually going on here, I'm sure it's genuine, if only because I don't think it'll be technically feasible to get WinXP to dual boot with OS X on a Mac.

Can't we just wait till

Microsoft releases Windows XP, Macintosh Edition or Virtual PC for Intel Macs. You really need to up the bounty. I know I would go through at least 2 iMacs before I figure out how to boot XP. 2800-2400= 400 which is not worth it.

Dumping garbage on the beach

Why do it? it a lot like the subject line.

Here's How I'd do it

I'm no expert, but I'm guessing that there will be plenty of other x86 OEMs who will make a Core Duo based system using the same chipset. Unlike Apple, they'll need to support the currently shipping version of XP, and therefore, will have to create the BIOS compatibility module for their machines. Because the Intel Mac is mostly standard Intel design, I'd take that compat module from a different machine and somehow shoehorn it into the Mac. Then, it should be just a matter of installing XP on it as you would with the other OEM's machine.

If anyone uses this method, please give me a cut of the prize. :)

are peopel going about this the wrong way?

Why not build a one of the open source bios kernels so that it looks like the mach_kernel and have it then boot something else like Windows, Lilo or Grub?

Brickified

Maybe the iMacs were brickified because they succesfully booted windows :)

donated

We just donated $50 we're hoping to move our pc's to the Intel Mac, and if we can get XP to boot on these, even better. Ours is the link with http://www.zangani.com/ [zangani.com]

You people are pathetic

So, "8 million readers" have read this post and the amount is under $5K.
Pathetic.
If everyone coughed up $10, the total would be way more than a lousy $5K. ,dave

iloadwin

If the lack of a bios is the problem ... how about performing the equivalent of loadlin by loading windows from osx/darwin letting it take care of dealing with the initialisation of the hardware? A program could "emulate" gathering the information a bios would supply and pass that to windows? I hearby suggest the name iloadwin :-D

This is SICK

And not in a good way. Why oh why would someone take a perfectly good Mac and hack on it to run an inferior OS? Why would having shown that Mac hardware can run Windoze be a Good Thing? I can think of a lot of more interesting ways to gain cred.

Re:BartPE

No, it shouldn't. You apparently either have no idea what BartPE is, or ou completely failed to even read the article summary.

BartPE is simply a custom version of XP that can boot from removable media. The EFI rom on the MacTel machines seems to forbid booting an El Torito volume.

Maybe...

It's to prove you can. Just like the people who hack IE to run on Linux in WINE, there's a lot of geek credit (and 15 minutes of fame) to be gained by doing this. If I had a mac, I'd try for it.

Short answer: Because you can.

For the last time...

If I could have a dual core machine with a really nice graphics card, and the machine was also cool, quiet, and attractive for $1300, and I could boot any OS I wanted on it (OS X, Linux, XP), I think I don't qualify as perverse. The iMac is a compact and powerful machine, and there's nothing available like it at the moment. Furthermore, give me the choice between carrying around two laptops or one (especially for developers or on-site technicians), can you possibly guess which one would be less expensive?

So, please, just drop this joke. It's been told a million times. If you don't have anything useful to say, just save your breath.

Re:If you do this...

Exercise your commercial rights and ask for a complete refund for this crippleware with undocumented features like TPM and EFI crc checking hint hint (llamas for not listening) while you can. I've worked with engineers at IBM for boot sequence problems while employed by them, and understand a fair bit about what happens during a boot sequence. This doesn't make me a name dropping hack, it means that I'm actually approaching this problem with some low level understanding of the hardware as it lights up. As I've stated earlier, I believe that the TPM unit checks the EFI to ensure it's Apple standard EFI (/. ers would all understand this) and then opens the system devices up based on a correct check. It seems to me the failure and 'non-bootable' status only comes after actually altering the EFI. I guess we're all /. ing and not connect the . ing. rent a clue day coming soon to a planet near you!

Re:Booting is fine, but where's the bounty for...

Maybe that can be the next contest. However, I think it will be won by vmware or microsoft.

Games.

Maybe they want to play games on occasion, but want the OSX experience the rest of the time. I know a LOT of people in that boat.

Re:How to get XP working on an iMac

I bet that Microsoft will not patch XP to work with EFI. We all know that Vista will support EFI, so MS will want to make people get Vista to run on the x86 Macs instead. MSFT will make money on two fronts: they will sell more copies of Vista and not have to spend money to patch XP.

Re:DEAR FRIEND

If you had RTFA, you would have seen that they already addressed that point.

-Eric

OS.X propagation and Nerds

I thought the whole point of getting OS X to Intel hardware was to propogate OS X?

Assuming that by 'propogate' you mean sell OS.X to run on generic PC's from bulk vendors like DELL,

The short answer is: NO

The long answer is: The move to Intel was done to enable Apple to market competitive, powerful, well designed and highly compact laptops. They still won't tolerate OS.X being run on non Apple computers.

Why are we so concerned about getting the iMac to run Windows?

So we can dual boot it with OS.X and use Windows to get maximum performance and stability out of Windows only PC games. Why else?????

Seriously, if you "brickify" your iMac while trying to Windoze-it, good... I laugh at you from a far... you deserve to own a $1300 paperweight.

You are new to this whole Nerd thing aren't you? The whole point of being a Nerd is to try to do tings to see if they can be done. Nerds never have, do not now and never will need a reason to do nerdy things and the same goes for stopping to think about the consequences. If we did stop to think about what we are doing so many of mankind's greatest discoveries and achievements would never have happened, the Manhattan project for example would never have been sucessfully concluded.

Re:This is a first

Don't you mean /. (as opposed to slash-asterisk)?

Re:Out of their minds I guess

Games, for one.. Options are nice..

Re:Out of their minds I guess

About 65 people asked this question already. It's in that discussion up above. People gave the EXACT SAME answers in almost every case.

I am not going to answer you. I am going to simply ask WHAT IN THE LOVE OF FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOUR BROKEN FUCKING BRAIN?