Members Bookumdano2 Posted October 21, 2011 Members Share Posted October 21, 2011 "Well, why on earth would you WANT to do this?"... (beat ya to it) What I did-I installed win7 64bit on a 2.26 Mac Mini (10.6) that I have sitting around. First time screwing around with Boot Camp and the install was fast and easy. Everything seems fine, device manager shows everything intact, and the little Apple bootcamp 3.3 updates happen very cooly from right within win 7. What I didn't know-To screw around a bit during the install, I clicked the advanced tab at the first couple of win install prompts and had Win 7 delete ALL existing partitions before it installed. In effect, zapping Mac os x. Figuring everything would fail. But it didn't.I now have a windows-only Mac Mini. Did you know you can do that? I didn't know I can do that. No Mac osx anywhere. No hidden partitions on the drive. The entire drive is allocated to ntfs. Turn the Mac off, turn it on, and Windows 7 64 bit boots right up. Pretty cool huh? There's probably a gotcha in there somewhere, most likely with trying to make and then restore a ghost image or something like that. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members techristian Posted October 21, 2011 Members Share Posted October 21, 2011 So why would you make an expensive Mac into a cheap Windows machine? :):) Dan Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Ronan Murphy Posted October 21, 2011 Members Share Posted October 21, 2011 So why would you make an expensive Mac into a cheap Windows machine? :) :) Outlook? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members ggm1960 Posted October 21, 2011 Members Share Posted October 21, 2011 Outlook? Outlook has replaced Entourage in the latest version of Mac Office, however, it's still a little hokey. The best example being; Save As is a grayed out non-function! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members rasputin1963 Posted October 21, 2011 Members Share Posted October 21, 2011 Every time a new, important software comes out, my MAC friends whine and moan that there is not yet a MAC version of it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members techristian Posted October 21, 2011 Members Share Posted October 21, 2011 Every time a new, important software comes out, my MAC friends whine and moan that there is not yet a MAC version of it. Market rules. wouldn't a developer rather create software for a market 10X larger, with the potential for 10X the revenue ? Then after sales starts to dip they can recode for the "other" OS's. Dan Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Cosmik de Bris Posted October 21, 2011 Members Share Posted October 21, 2011 If I really need Windows stuff on the Mac, it's only the software for my car at the moment, I run it as a virtual machine using Vmware. It works pretty well for my stuff. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members UstadKhanAli Posted October 22, 2011 Members Share Posted October 22, 2011 So why would you make an expensive Mac into a cheap Windows machine? :) :) Dan Isn't the question: "So why would you make a cheap Mac Mini into two kinds of computers in one?" Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members UstadKhanAli Posted October 22, 2011 Members Share Posted October 22, 2011 Every time a new, important software comes out, my MAC friends whine and moan that there is not yet a MAC version of it. Mac users need to make certain that whatever they already want to run already exists. There are definitely not as many applications, software, etc. for Macs, and that's one of the benefits of PCs, as I've mentioned numerous times. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Bookumdano2 Posted October 25, 2011 Author Members Share Posted October 25, 2011 This may best belong at macrumors, but that place is kinda creepy. Their vintage forums are okay though. Just in case anyone cares, I experimented with reinstalling the Mac os, set up the win 7 bootcamp partition again, and reinstalled win 7 64 bit, this time letting everything install the way Apple intended boot camp to work. Pretty nifty. I then used Time Machine to back up the Mac part of the drive, booted into windows and then used ghost to back up the windows side to a separate ntfs ext drive. Total time for backups, about 10 minutes. I then mangled the files on both sides so neither side would boot. Then used Time Machine to restore the Mac side, reset the ntfs partition, and then restored the Ghost win 7 image to the ntfs side. Total time on the restores was about 20 minutes. I also experimented with fouling up just windows so that it wouldn't boot and then restoring the ghost image of that to the ntfs partition. Takes about 6 minutes to to that. So this is pretty cool. I now know about how much time it takes to restore either side in a catastrophe or in routine times when I want to do a fresh or earlier backup restore. I also figure that I now have an extra $300 Mac and a $300 Win 7 machine. That eases the "this thing is not worth $600" feeling I always get when I have to plug in a new Mini every few years. I'm going to pop 8gb of ram in since ram is so cheap. For now, I have the Mac to simply boot up into windows every time. I'll have to remember that there's a Mac in there too. By the way, did you know that win 7 doesn't really want you to pin folders down on the taskbar? Apparently only programs. I figured out how to pin folders down there too, so all in all, this has been a fun few days with the Mini that is normally rarely used. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members philbo Posted October 25, 2011 Members Share Posted October 25, 2011 Wow, must be nice to have that much time on your hands... Cool info though. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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