The subject line says it all. I have had a real mission getting this working as I wanted it, so thought I'd share with the interweb at large. Am mainly posting here to get this thread onto a Google search page so that anyone who wanted to do this after me has a resource that points out all the pitfalls and tricks required to get it working.
I wanted to run Win2K8 on my Macbook Alu for part of my Masters dissertation, particularly the Hyper-V virtualisation/virtualization (I shall also put the Yank spelling here just to help the Googlers!). However, several problems emerged:
1) Obviously to run Hyper-V, you need the 64 bit version of Win2k8. However, ridiculously, there is no "support" for 64 bit Windowses (Windii?) on the Alu MacBook. They run, but if you try to install the Boot Camp drivers for sound, network, etc, you get a nice little message saying "Boot Camp x64 is not supported on this machine" or something to that effect.
2) Hyper-V depends on Intel VT hardware virtualisation. This needs to be enabled in the BIOS of a machine you intend to use it on. "Aha", says the brighter of my audience. "We don't have a BIOS, we have EFI". That's not entirely true. Actually, if you install Windows using Boot Camp, you end up with a brain dead BIOS emulation sort of thing. Said brain dead BIOS does NOT have hardware virtualisation enabled, at least not on the Macbook Alu. However, Windows has been able to boot from EFI since Win2k3. The reason why we have to have this brain dead BIOS emulation ***** is because Windows cannot (in theory) boot from a GPT disk. Therefore Boot Camp's BIOS emulation abstracts both EFI and GPT away from Windows so it thinks it's booting on legacy hardware and disk partitioning.
In contrast, if Windows 2k8 is booted via EFI, virtualisation seems to be enabled fine. Unfortunately, that means you can't use the GPT/GUID partitioning usually found on a Mac.
The upshot of this is:
1) If you intend to use Hyper-V, you CANNOT use Boot Camp. In fact the only way I could get it working was to use an entirely NEW disk for Windows 2k8, using MBR partitioning. This rules out having a dual boot OSX/Win2k8 setup (because OSX is not partial to MBR*). At the moment I am physically swapping drives to go between OSX and Win2k8.
2) If you don't care about Hyper-V, you can use Boot Camp to partition your disk and have a dual boot setup as normal. The drivers and the "Boot Camp x64 doesn't work on a Alu" message are then the main issue.
So:
* install Windows in whatever fashion suits. If you want Hyper-V, I'm afraid it'll need a brand new drive and you'll need to make sure it's partitioned with MBR not GPT/GUID (if it is the latter, Google around for it - you can convert it during the Windows installer easily enough, but otherwise Windows just won't install). If you don't want Hyper-V, you can use Boot Camp.
* Boot into Windows and put your Leopard install disk in. Windows autorun will then run the setup.exe in the root of the disk, and you'll get the farcical "x64 doesn't work with an Alu" message. Explore the contents of the DVD instead. I don't have the disk to hand so can't tell you exactly where it is, but buried deep in the directory structure somewhere (I think it's something like bootcamp\drivers\Apple) is a bootcamp64.msi installer. Run that and all the drivers you need will be installed and you'll have a fully operational Windows Server 2008, with video, LAN, wifi etc drivers.
* If you plan to use WiFi, you need to actually add it as a feature (go into Server Manager, do "Add Features").
* You can now go and add whatever roles you need (i.e. Hyper-V, IIS, Terminal Services etc).
I hope this will help anyone else should they ever want to do the same thing - a post like this when I started would have saved me the better part of two weeks. I was on the verge of buying a "real" PC just for this project - thankfully I cracked it just before doing that!
----
* I say that OSX won't boot from MBR partitioned disks. Actually that's not true, the Hackintoshed Netbook I'm typing this on now does precisely that. I'm wondering if perhaps some of the work from the Hackintosh community might actually be of benefit here for getting both Win2k8 and OSX on a MBR partition. Or maybe a Carbon Copy Cloner approach might work - I might not be able to install my Macbook's install disk on a MBR disk but I could certainly restore my existing install onto one. Not sure what that'd do to updates, though. When I get time I'll play a bit more and post back.
Some more thoughts after searching around and doing some more research - I'm not sure that my Win2k8 disk is using EFI at all. Apparently one has to explicitly select the EFI install mode, which I never did. So I think the reason why my Win2k8-only hard drive results in a running hypervisor and Hyper-V operating, is the opposite of what I thought: the built-in legacy BIOS emulation has the Intel VT CPU extensions on, whereas once you get into EFI booting, they're disabled. So, when you boot a Windows partition via Boot Camp, you DO actually boot via EFI in the first instance (to get the OS selection screen up). When you select Windows from here, yes, BIOS emulation is used to boot - but the intermediate step through EFI disables the VT extensions. In contrast, a boot from a clean, Win2k8-only disk never goes near EFI, and just uses the legacy BIOS emulation built into the Alu firmware.
This would seem to follow instructions I saw somewhere on the internet for Mac Pro users, which noted that booting into Windows by holding down the Alt key resulted in no hypervisor and thus no Hyper-V in Win2k8, whereas selecting Windows from the Startup Disk preference pane and rebooting worked fine (for some reason I'm not seeing my Windows partition in my Startup Disk pane, so I can't check that).
I wanted to run Win2K8 on my Macbook Alu for part of my Masters dissertation, particularly the Hyper-V virtualisation/virtualization (I shall also put the Yank spelling here just to help the Googlers!). However, several problems emerged:
1) Obviously to run Hyper-V, you need the 64 bit version of Win2k8. However, ridiculously, there is no "support" for 64 bit Windowses (Windii?) on the Alu MacBook. They run, but if you try to install the Boot Camp drivers for sound, network, etc, you get a nice little message saying "Boot Camp x64 is not supported on this machine" or something to that effect.
2) Hyper-V depends on Intel VT hardware virtualisation. This needs to be enabled in the BIOS of a machine you intend to use it on. "Aha", says the brighter of my audience. "We don't have a BIOS, we have EFI". That's not entirely true. Actually, if you install Windows using Boot Camp, you end up with a brain dead BIOS emulation sort of thing. Said brain dead BIOS does NOT have hardware virtualisation enabled, at least not on the Macbook Alu. However, Windows has been able to boot from EFI since Win2k3. The reason why we have to have this brain dead BIOS emulation ***** is because Windows cannot (in theory) boot from a GPT disk. Therefore Boot Camp's BIOS emulation abstracts both EFI and GPT away from Windows so it thinks it's booting on legacy hardware and disk partitioning.
In contrast, if Windows 2k8 is booted via EFI, virtualisation seems to be enabled fine. Unfortunately, that means you can't use the GPT/GUID partitioning usually found on a Mac.
The upshot of this is:
1) If you intend to use Hyper-V, you CANNOT use Boot Camp. In fact the only way I could get it working was to use an entirely NEW disk for Windows 2k8, using MBR partitioning. This rules out having a dual boot OSX/Win2k8 setup (because OSX is not partial to MBR*). At the moment I am physically swapping drives to go between OSX and Win2k8.
2) If you don't care about Hyper-V, you can use Boot Camp to partition your disk and have a dual boot setup as normal. The drivers and the "Boot Camp x64 doesn't work on a Alu" message are then the main issue.
So:
* install Windows in whatever fashion suits. If you want Hyper-V, I'm afraid it'll need a brand new drive and you'll need to make sure it's partitioned with MBR not GPT/GUID (if it is the latter, Google around for it - you can convert it during the Windows installer easily enough, but otherwise Windows just won't install). If you don't want Hyper-V, you can use Boot Camp.
* Boot into Windows and put your Leopard install disk in. Windows autorun will then run the setup.exe in the root of the disk, and you'll get the farcical "x64 doesn't work with an Alu" message. Explore the contents of the DVD instead. I don't have the disk to hand so can't tell you exactly where it is, but buried deep in the directory structure somewhere (I think it's something like bootcamp\drivers\Apple) is a bootcamp64.msi installer. Run that and all the drivers you need will be installed and you'll have a fully operational Windows Server 2008, with video, LAN, wifi etc drivers.
* If you plan to use WiFi, you need to actually add it as a feature (go into Server Manager, do "Add Features").
* You can now go and add whatever roles you need (i.e. Hyper-V, IIS, Terminal Services etc).
I hope this will help anyone else should they ever want to do the same thing - a post like this when I started would have saved me the better part of two weeks. I was on the verge of buying a "real" PC just for this project - thankfully I cracked it just before doing that!
----
* I say that OSX won't boot from MBR partitioned disks. Actually that's not true, the Hackintoshed Netbook I'm typing this on now does precisely that. I'm wondering if perhaps some of the work from the Hackintosh community might actually be of benefit here for getting both Win2k8 and OSX on a MBR partition. Or maybe a Carbon Copy Cloner approach might work - I might not be able to install my Macbook's install disk on a MBR disk but I could certainly restore my existing install onto one. Not sure what that'd do to updates, though. When I get time I'll play a bit more and post back.
Some more thoughts after searching around and doing some more research - I'm not sure that my Win2k8 disk is using EFI at all. Apparently one has to explicitly select the EFI install mode, which I never did. So I think the reason why my Win2k8-only hard drive results in a running hypervisor and Hyper-V operating, is the opposite of what I thought: the built-in legacy BIOS emulation has the Intel VT CPU extensions on, whereas once you get into EFI booting, they're disabled. So, when you boot a Windows partition via Boot Camp, you DO actually boot via EFI in the first instance (to get the OS selection screen up). When you select Windows from here, yes, BIOS emulation is used to boot - but the intermediate step through EFI disables the VT extensions. In contrast, a boot from a clean, Win2k8-only disk never goes near EFI, and just uses the legacy BIOS emulation built into the Alu firmware.
This would seem to follow instructions I saw somewhere on the internet for Mac Pro users, which noted that booting into Windows by holding down the Alt key resulted in no hypervisor and thus no Hyper-V in Win2k8, whereas selecting Windows from the Startup Disk preference pane and rebooting worked fine (for some reason I'm not seeing my Windows partition in my Startup Disk pane, so I can't check that).