More on iMac/Vista

I've had another go at it, following a combination of steps that I've found in various forums all over the internet.

I've now gotten Vista as far as getting past the boot loader, and displaying the progress bar on a black screen, where it is, I assume, loading drivers.

To get it this far, I had to:

• Run Boot Camp to repartition the drive


• use the gpt command, in OS X, to remove the 200MB EFI firmware partition at the start of the disk


• Run the Vista Installer and install on the Boot Camp created partition


• Boot off the Vista DVD again, and go into the repair options


• In CMD.EXE off the DVD, use bcdedit from the C:\Windows\System32 directory to change the boot device


• reboot =)

I'm assuming it's a driver problem, or more issues with GPT/MBR weirdness - what I think Boot Camp is doing is tweaking the Protective MBR so that Windows sees the MBR as being a representation of the GPT partitions. VIsta, knowing explicitly about the MBR and the GPT, isn't so easily fooled, and even though I've nuked the EFI partition on the disk, it's still a GPT partitioned disk, and I think this is where Vista is getting confused, as it works perfectly (well, a whole heap better anyway) if Vista formats the disk as MBR.