Mac Pro - After Clean Install Of Windows 7 64 Without BootCamp

[Falcon703549]

Hi, I have recently like many purchased a couple of SSD drives and decided to do a completely fresh install of Windows Pro 64 Bit without use of BootCamp on my Mac Pro 2008. (I need windows for work and running under a VM will not do. I also did not want to be running two separate machines when a Mac Pro will run both operating systems as well.)

All Apple Discs removed from MacPro for this purpose. I was able to create a bootable Windows 7 disc and install. Drivers were already downloaded previous to this. Windows runs well and the speed is excellent.

My previous Apple disc had became damaged and I was no longer able to boot into this so I decided to try and create a USB boot disc from my Mac Air which is running Mountain Lion. I did this and when I connect to the Mac Air, all looks ok and it looks like it wants to boot and install.

PROBLEM 1 When I remove the Windows SSD from the Mac Pro, I install another hard drive and connect the USB drive and attempt to install, I am presented with a no entry sign.

Now I'm wondering if this is because the new disk is not correctly formatted?

PROBLEM 2 When I remove the hard disk and replace my SSD disks and switch on again, windows does not boot. This is what is worrying me the most at present, I go through numerous on / off and eventually it does boot but there appears to be no reason for this. When it's not booting, all I get is a black screen and flashing cursor. Any ideas what might be causing this?

I have been using the Mac Pro with the new installation for about a week now, booting each morning has not been an issue but when I remove the SSD's and try something different it seems to have problems and I don't understand why.

What I would like to get to is the ability to boot into Windows or Mac. I did not really want to be using boot camp.

Any suggestions / guidance?

Falcon703549

 

[monkeybagel]

Hi, I have recently like many purchased a couple of SSD drives and decided to do a completely fresh install of Windows Pro 64 Bit without use of BootCamp on my Mac Pro 2008. (I need windows for work and running under a VM will not do. I also did not want to be running two separate machines when a Mac Pro will run both operating systems as well.)

All Apple Discs removed from MacPro for this purpose. I was able to create a bootable Windows 7 disc and install. Drivers were already downloaded previous to this. Windows runs well and the speed is excellent.

My previous Apple disc had became damaged and I was no longer able to boot into this so I decided to try and create a USB boot disc from my Mac Air which is running Mountain Lion. I did this and when I connect to the Mac Air, all looks ok and it looks like it wants to boot and install.

PROBLEM 1 When I remove the Windows SSD from the Mac Pro, I install another hard drive and connect the USB drive and attempt to install, I am presented with a no entry sign.

Now I'm wondering if this is because the new disk is not correctly formatted?

PROBLEM 2 When I remove the hard disk and replace my SSD disks and switch on again, windows does not boot. This is what is worrying me the most at present, I go through numerous on / off and eventually it does boot but there appears to be no reason for this. When it's not booting, all I get is a black screen and flashing cursor. Any ideas what might be causing this?

I have been using the Mac Pro with the new installation for about a week now, booting each morning has not been an issue but when I remove the SSD's and try something different it seems to have problems and I don't understand why.

What I would like to get to is the ability to boot into Windows or Mac. I did not really want to be using boot camp.

Any suggestions / guidance?

Falcon703549

All Boot Camp is is a disk partition utility and driver set. There is really nothing wrong with using it. Was your goal just to dedicate Windows to its own disk?

What I would recommend doing to restore is to run this no the MacBook Air:

http://support.apple.com/kb/dl1433

This will create a bootable flash drive. Then remove the all disks from the Mac Pro except the one you want the clean installation of OS X on, insert this USB drive in the front of the machine and power it on. It should see this as the only boot drive and boot to it. From there, you should be able to download and install a fresh copy of Mountain Lion.

If your MacBook Air came with Mountain Lion, there is a chance this may not work as the recovery partition could be tied to that hardware in some fashion, but I would give this a try first.

 

[Falcon703549]

All Boot Camp is is a disk partition utility and driver set. There is really nothing wrong with using it. Was your goal just to dedicate Windows to its own disk?

What I would recommend doing to restore is to run this no the MacBook Air:

http://support.apple.com/kb/dl1433

This will create a bootable flash drive. Then remove the all disks from the Mac Pro except the one you want the clean installation of OS X on, insert this USB drive in the front of the machine and power it on. It should see this as the only boot drive and boot to it. From there, you should be able to download and install a fresh copy of Mountain Lion.

If your MacBook Air came with Mountain Lion, there is a chance this may not work as the recovery partition could be tied to that hardware in some fashion, but I would give this a try first.

I thought that installing direct would make it faster, I may be mistaken in that?

The Mac Air came with Lion and I updated it to Mountain Lion. I will give this a try, I have already created a bootable USB but will try again.

Thanks.

 

[monkeybagel]

I thought that installing direct would make it faster, I may be mistaken in that?

The Mac Air came with Lion and I updated it to Mountain Lion. I will give this a try, I have already created a bootable USB but will try again.

Thanks.

Depending on your internet connection, it could be slow. I am hoping, but have never experimented much, that the recovery partition will include whatever drivers you need to get into a recovery environment to get the OS downloaded successfully.

The fact that you purchased ML from that App Store is a good thing in this case.

 

[Falcon703549]

Depending on your internet connection, it could be slow. I am hoping, but have never experimented much, that the recovery partition will include whatever drivers you need to get into a recovery environment to get the OS downloaded successfully.

The fact that you purchased ML from that App Store is a good thing in this case.

Any thoughts on why removing my SSD's causes a problem when I put them back in?

 

[monkeybagel]

Any thoughts on why removing my SSD's causes a problem when I put them back in?

The Mac Pro's firmware can be flaky sometimes and sometimes you will need to do a PRAM reset when things like that happen. It was a common occurrence on my new 5,1, but since I don't remove drives and change boot option as often anymore, I rarely have to do it.

I have found that some USB drives connect can cause it to act strange, so you may try disconnecting them if you have not already.

 

[Falcon703549]

The Mac Pro's firmware can be flaky sometimes and sometimes you will need to do a PRAM reset when things like that happen. It was a common occurrence on my new 5,1, but since I don't remove drives and change boot option as often anymore, I rarely have to do it.

I have found that some USB drives connect can cause it to act strange, so you may try disconnecting them if you have not already.

OK, I managed to install snow leopard to a clean hard drive yesterday, I happened to have an install disk lying around. After getting through the install process I get told it is successful and a restart is needed. It gets frozen and eventually I restart it manually but it can never find the hard drive.

Any suggestions?

 

[monkeybagel]

OK, I managed to install snow leopard to a clean hard drive yesterday, I happened to have an install disk lying around. After getting through the install process I get told it is successful and a restart is needed. It gets frozen and eventually I restart it manually but it can never find the hard drive.

Any suggestions?

Are you using a geniuine retail disc or a "different" kind of disc?

Option key does nothing when you hear the bong?

----------

Are you using a geniuine retail disc or a "different" kind of disc?

Option key does nothing when you hear the bong?

Since you purchased 10.8 from the App Store, I would redownload it to the Air as InstallESD.dmg, and use one of the many tutorials on the Internet to write that to the flash drive. First, use disk utility to erase the destination hard disk/SSD to ensure there is not anything hidden at the beginning of the disk causing problems. Then, install ML from the USB flash drive.

 

[Falcon703549]

Are you using a geniuine retail disc or a "different" kind of disc?

Option key does nothing when you hear the bong?

----------



Since you purchased 10.8 from the App Store, I would redownload it to the Air as InstallESD.dmg, and use one of the many tutorials on the Internet to write that to the flash drive. First, use disk utility to erase the destination hard disk/SSD to ensure there is not anything hidden at the beginning of the disk causing problems. Then, install ML from the USB flash drive.

I have tried everything so far, short of going out and buying a new disk. I have created a USB with Mountain Lion but it refuses to install. Its the fact that the hard disks are not recognized that gets me!

 

[monkeybagel]

I have tried everything so far, short of going out and buying a new disk. I have created a USB with Mountain Lion but it refuses to install. Its the fact that the hard disks are not recognized that gets me!

Have you reset the PRAM and the SMC?

 

[Falcon703549]

Have you reset the PRAM and the SMC?

Firstly thank you for all the suggestions and advice you have offered, it has been much appreciated.

We are getting there!!!

The reason it would not boot / install from the USB is because my Mac Pro falls into the camp - can't run Mountain Lion....

I found out by getting a DVD of Snow Leopard and installing from this. I then updated this and tried to install Mountain Lion but got told it could not be upgraded.

The disk is now being recognized!

My decision now is do I go back and set things up correctly with Boot Camp (I have created a partition) but it would need installing Windows again or can I use some software to copy over the existing disk to the partition?

I would have to copy it back again as I want windows running of my SSD.

Any final thoughts and thanks again.

 

[monkeybagel]

Firstly thank you for all the suggestions and advice you have offered, it has been much appreciated.

We are getting there!!!

The reason it would not boot / install from the USB is because my Mac Pro falls into the camp - can't run Mountain Lion....

I found out by getting a DVD of Snow Leopard and installing from this. I then updated this and tried to install Mountain Lion but got told it could not be upgraded.

The disk is now being recognized!

My decision now is do I go back and set things up correctly with Boot Camp (I have created a partition) but it would need installing Windows again or can I use some software to copy over the existing disk to the partition?

I would have to copy it back again as I want windows running of my SSD.

Any final thoughts and thanks again.

Did you install OS X on the SSD as well?

 

[Falcon703549]

Did you install OS X on the SSD as well?

No separate drive:

• SSD - Windows
• SSD - Data Location
• Hard Disk - OSX

 

[murphychris]

I did not really want to be using boot camp.

Chances are you're getting NVRAM confusion or corruption because of the swapping out of these drives. So you might consider not doing that.

I'm not sure what you think Boot Camp is, but it's not any one thing. There are the Boot Camp drivers, which is a package of drivers for Windows that makes it run better on Apple hardware. You need those, or you need to dig up newer versions from the manufacturers if you want. Boot Camp Assistant has three purposes: 1. It repartitions a drive so both OS X and Windows can use it; if you are using separate disks technically you don't need this function of BCA. 2. It downloads and installs the drivers mentioned before onto separate media. 3. It will create USB bootable install media for newer Macs, and it also modifies the bootable Windows image to include the drivers needed to boot on newer Macs. Your 2008 Mac probably can boot Windows from a DVD directly so you don't actually need Boot Camp Assistant, but you'll still need to download the current bootcamp.exe drivers. You can get those off the Apple support area.

The other part of Boot Camp is in the firmware, the CSM (Compatibility Support Module) provides a BIOS interface for Windows. You effectively have no choice but to use this, or you're going to have to dig into one of the forums about hacking Windows to get it to work via native EFI booting on Macs.

So I suggest you connect all of the drives. Zap the PRAM. And presumably it will boot into OS X from the HDD. And if you've done the installation correctly, the System Preferences > Startup Disk menu will have a Windows option so you can switch to booting Windows.

 

[ccoastmike]

Win7 x64 Blinking Cursor Issue - My work around

Not sure if anyone has figured this out or not but since I've been banging my head on my keyboard most of the night trying to get Win7 x64 to boot correctly using BootCamp...I thought I'd share what I came up with.

System setup: 13" MacBook Pro (mid-2012) with 10.8, SSD and HDD (in optical bay)

When I initially had the SuperDrive in the optical bay, I could get Win7 x64 to install just fine. The only problem being that when it booted it would get stuck at a screen with a blinking cursor for 1-2 minutes...after this it was fine.

Once I pulled out the SuperDrive in place of the second HDD, Win7 x64 would never get past this blinking cursor stage. I tried different partition schemes, multiple installs, etc all with no luck.

I read several guides suggesting the use of the Win7 USB install (created by BootCamp utility) to have the recovery console fix some issues with the MBR and rebuilding the BCD. Sadly, the Win7 USB installer kept telling me it didn't support my installation of Win7 (I'm guessing the x64 part).

I was able to find an ISO image of the Win7 x64 System Repair Disc but then ran into multiple other problems because I couldn't boot into the repair disc from my Mac or use the BootCamp utility to put it on a USB drive. Turns out that the x64 System Repair Disc doesn't support EFI.

So here was my workaround:
-Used BootCamp utility to create the BootCamp partition.
-Used BootCamp utility to create the USB install drive for Win7
-Installed Win7 x64 per the BootCamp instructions.
-Several reboots later, I would get to the blinking cursor stopping point.
-Boot back into 10.8 and open up the Win7 USB drive and the Win7 x64 System Repair Disc ISO side by side. You'll notice the Repair disc iso is missing the EFI folder.
-On your Win7 USB drive, delete everything EXCEPT the EFI folder.
-From the Repair Disc ISO image, copy the entire contents over to the Win7 USB drive.
-Shutdown 10.8 and hold the option key during reboot. Boot from the Win7 USB drive. With the addition the EFI folder, the System Repair Disc should support booting using EFI.
-Go into the recovery console command prompt and enter the following:
Bootrec.exe /FixMbr [ENTER]
Bootrec.exe /FixBoot [ENTER]
Bootrec.exe /RebuildBcd [ENTER]
-Shutdown and reboot into Win7 x64. My blinking cursor issue was solved at this point.

Hopefully this works for other people with the same issue. Please let me know!

 

[murphychris]

Turns out that the x64 System Repair Disc doesn't support EFI.

What does the System Repair Disc contain that the DVD installer does not? Because the DVD installer that Boot Camp Assistant can make USB bootable, also contains bootrec.exe on it.