Windows 7: 64bit & Mac Book Pro (MBP) “Santa Rosa” Snow Leopard Boot Camp (and probably “Penryn” too)

This is something I sorted out just after windows 7 was released and have meaning to post the solution (or links to parts of the solution) for a while:

Getting Windows 7 running as the “Boot Camp” partition in Snow Leopard is not easy if you don’t have the latest (currently “Unibody”) MBP models.  As mine is a little older, Apple does not go out of their way to make this easy.  I nearly gave up about 3 times, but finally got it all up-and-running.  Here is how to do it:

Before I start: I have the “Santa Rosa” MBP.  This would probably also work for “Penryn” and other macs where these issues appear.  I am running OS 10.6 Snow Leopard.

 Now the steps:

1. Try to install Windows 7 64bit boot camp in the normal way.  If you are lucky, it will work, however, I got the “Select CD-ROM Boot Type :” message when booting.
2. Check and follow this post which explains this post.  This talks you through how to re-burn the Windows 7 disc in a form that is readable by these models of MBP.
3. Once you successfully get Windows 7 installed using the methods outlined in the blogs above, the normal next step is to “insert the Snow Leopard Disc and install the Boot Camp drivers”.  However, this resulted in an error message “Boot Camp x64 is unsupported on this computer model”.  There is a workaround for this too, described in this post. 
4. However, the above workaround for getting the Snow Leopard drivers installed also did not work, as I was unable to browse to the disc via the DOS prompt – it was visible in windows explorer, but not in DOS.  It is at this point that I really nearly gave up and went to 32bit, however, the final workaround I employed was to copy the contents of the Snow Leopard CD onto the Boot Camp Hard Drive, then use the workaround linked in “4″, above to get the drivers installed.  This worked!  And now I have Windows 7 working as the Boot Camp partition and fully updated with all of the latest Apple drivers for my system!

Linking to Facebook

exploring options of linking the blog with Facebook.  Hopefully this is possible, although all of the blog links that I see on FB come from Blogspot.  If this isnt possible using WordPress I’ll probably change over.

Revamped www.rafaelkassier.com

…so I am trying blog format for a while.  I’ll see if I can dig up some of the old posts and put them up here over time…