Vista and OS X on an iMac

I had no problems getting Vista to install on the iMac Core Duo, as long as it was the only OS on the hard drive, or more specifically, if it initialised the hard disk itself, and used an MBR partitioning scheme.

Getting Vista and OS X to coexist is turning out to be rather difficult.

There's some useful information in the Windows and GPT FAQ on Microsoft's web site. I think that the problem is that Vista knows about a GPT partioned disk, and for the 64-bit version, it will boot off a GPT disk if you have an EFI firmware, whereas the 32-bit version, uses the BIOS and expects to boot off a MBR disk.

XP, being more tied to MBR, is fooled into seeing an MBR disk by Boot Camp, and will happily boot, however Vista sees past the MBR on the GPT disk and looks at the GPT partitions, and from there it won't boot, as it's using BIOS to boot, not EFI. At least, that's my theory on it all.



There are reports of people getting it working by doing the Boot Camp thing, installing Vista and then when it won't boot being able to run the repair off the install CD, however in Beta 2 this doesn't work for me - the repair fails.

The strange thing is that Vista installer sees the Vista partition created in Boot Camp as C:. it's just the bootloader doesn't, and therein lies my problem.