Windows 7 Native, no boot camp, no parallels

[christianitaly]

Hello, new here. MacUser for long time, pulled the hard drive from my 1st gen MacBook and popped in what I thought was a blank hard drive, booted the machine. Had to take a phone call and when I returned, there was Windows 7 Ultimate sitting there, staring at me on my Mac! It installed all the drivers for the hardware, too. No Mac software installed on the drive (I've looked!) Has anyone else experienced this? However: I can't get a right-click function out if it.
Does Microsoft know it can run a Mac without BootCamp; do the Parallels people know this? Does APPLE know this?

 

[simsaladimbamba]

Does Microsoft know it can run a Mac without BootCamp; do the Parallels people know this? Does APPLE know this?

Yes, why should they and yes.
EFI is an universal boot loader which is also used on other computers, and many people seem to be solely interested in running Windows on a Mac and have removed Mac OS X entirely.

Maybe you could download the latest Boot Camp drivers from Apple to gain right-click functionality?

 

[bobobenobi]

Alert the media!

 

[Consultant]

Sounds like someone installed it AND the bootcamp drivers.

Or maybe Microsoft employee remotely installed them for you when you are not watching.

 

[balamw]

Does Microsoft know it can run a Mac without BootCamp; do the Parallels people know this? Does APPLE know this?

It's not entirely without Boot Camp.

Boot Camp is three things.

1. A non-destructive partition tool called Boot Camp Assistant
2. Extensions to the EFI Firmware that allow for boting legacy OSes
3. A set of Windows drivers that support the hardware, including right click functionality for the trackpad.

(Even Windows 7 64 bit which provides some support for EFI and GPT doesn't seem like it works without the some MBR support. So even though you don't need to use Boot Camp Assistant or install the drivers for basic functionality, you don't get out of using the firmware part.)

B

 

[hfg]

Mac hardware these days is so "generic" that they will pretty much run Windows out-of-the-box without any installation problems. Any PC or motherboard you purchase will come with a disk of post-install windows drivers for the specific chipsets used on the motherboard, Apple has done the same.

Apple graciously provided the necessary drivers for Windows on the OS X installation disk, which, if inserted while running the Windows OS, will proceed to load any Apple hardware specific drivers as well as some useful operational conveniences (display brightness, eject, keyboard mapping, etc.) similar to those in OS X.