Installing Windows is a lot like Boot Camp.

Alright, so Hell must have frozen over today. As most everyone has probably heard by now, Apple released a new utility called Boot Camp to allow you to easily install and run Windows on your brand new Intel Mac. So why did I put easily in italics? Well, because if you don't do it just right then it won't work at all.

So let's examine what the requirements are for using Boot Camp. Apple says that in order to install Boot Camp you must use a single-disk, Windows XP SP2 installation CD. But why not a normal Window XP CD, why must it include SP2? Is there some major reason why WinXP sans XP2 won't run? Probably not, my guess is that it's just a bug in the WinXP installer that keeps you from being able to install any old WinXP version.

So what might the problem be? Well, I tried to install Windows XP SP2 today on our Intel iMac at work. The first thing I tried was to use an MSDN DVD from our large collection of MSDN disks that includes several versions of Windows including Windows XP SP2. The disk started up and presented me with a selection screen where I could choose the version of Windows I wanted to install. I tried to select WinXP SP2 but the keyboard wouldn't work. (And yes, it's a wired USB keyboard and yes I installed the iMac Firmware update.)

So then we thought that we'd try just a plain WinXP SP2 CD. We didn't have any of those around but our MSDN collection included a disk with a WinXP SP2 ISO that we could create a CD from. So we tried that and the installer looked like it was starting up and running. But then it got hung up and eventually returned an error:

File \i386\ntkrnlmp.exe could not be loaded.
The error code is 7

Setup cannot continue. Press any key to exit.

That was it, there was no getting past this. Oh, and to top it off I still couldn't use the keyboard to press the Any key. ;-) Next I googled for ntkrnlmp.exe and found that this is a known issue. Microsoft's workaround for it is to press the F7 key when the installer prompts you to press F6 to install any custom SCSI drivers. Press F7 when it asks you to press F6!? Oh isn't that completely obvious. I guess we have to leave it to Microsoft keep things simple, right? Anyway, I can't do this either because the damn keyboard still doesn't work at this point in the installation. So assuming that this workaround would work, I still can't do it. Right now, I'm waiting for a true Win XP SP2 CD and hoping that it works. We're guessing that the ones we got from MSDN are somehow different from the SP2 CD you get in stores or with computers.

Which leads me to my last point, which is really just a wild-ass guess. I'm guessing that the reason why Apple requires Windows XP SP2 install disks is because they're probably the first installation CDs that fix the ntkrnlmp.exe bug. If it weren't for this stupid bug I'd bet that you could install any version of Win XP. So thank you Microsoft for producing such great, bug-free software!

So why install Windows on a Mac anyway? I despise Windows but we could really use a Multi-CPU/Mulit-Core Windows box right now to help in reproducing and debugging threading issues that only show up on multi-CPU machines. Right now almost everything we have that has more than one CPU is a Mac. Multi-CPU Windows machines just haven't been very common until recently. Plus I'd like to be able to build and run my profiling application on Windows whenever I need to.

Oh yeah, and I really need to play some computer Solitaire. What else is Windows good for other than games?

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