Oh! Apple

My experience of using iPod Touch, iPod Classics, Mac OSX, Coding in XCode, or anything generally related to Apple

Sunday, February 21, 2010

Crazy error on Windows 7 side of my Mac Mini

The more I think about it, my experience with MacMini running Windows 7 is kind of like my old experience of running DOS on my old Mac Qudra 610 DOS Compatible: things usually work, but when it failed you can get very frustrated. It's almost as if Steve intentionally put these crap in the environment to prove a point, "see? I told you Windows suck!"

Here's a few Gotcha I experienced so far:
  • I used Acronis Disk Director 10 on MacMini running Windows 7, hoping to create 3 partitions for various usage, but Disk Director failed to reboot the machine because of some mysterious problem (like without enough privilege to reboot, even though the app is running with administrator right.) So I solved the problem by doing the partitioning on ANOTHER machine (Lenovo S12, to be exact). Sigh, so there are things that I CANNOT do on the Windows 7 in Mac Mini.

  • I got a Windows 7 boot problem. I resolved it by starting the BootCamp Assitant on Mac side, got the machine reboot using the Windows 7 installation disc, and then do a system repair at the beginning of Windows 7 installation. I suspect that the problem is caused the fact that I have a bootable FAT32 partition on an external USB drive. And maybe the start up process (by holding the ALT key) confused by trying to bootup with that FAT32 partition. Solution? I found an app on the Mac side called BootChamp which allows me to specify which partition to use to reboot into Windows. That seems to solve the problem.

  • I found that my "portable" Need For Speed Shift didn't start because some missing Nvidia file. So I downloaded the latest NVidia driver and see if it can fix the problem. Well, it didn't. Deal to stupidity and disappointment, I uninstalled the drivers. Big mistake. Now the video driver rolled back to VGA. Using the Snow Leopard bootup disk trying to recover the drivers, and still didn't work. I used Windows Driver Manager, select update driver on the video adapter. That worked. It downloaded NVidia driver and installed it. But the problem is that there's an item called "Co-Processor" didn't get the right driver. I rightcliked on the item and let Windows update it. Windows pointed me to a file, which I downloaded, installed and fix the problem. The whole process wasted me almost half an hour. How stupid.

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