I haven’t had a post about Windows yet, so here you go. My MacBook Pro has been dual-booting into Windows XP SP2 since I had OS X 10.4, “Tiger” installed. This is an older version of Boot Camp, with drivers that are now outdated. I also tinkered with them a bit by installing some newer NVidia drivers from laptopvideo2go.com.
I wanted a fresh Windows install with SP3 and the latest Boot Camp 2.1 drivers. Apple recommends that you install Boot Camp 2.1 before installing SP3. But what if you have a Windows disc with SP3 already slipstreamed? It should work, but I couldn’t find a good answer on the web, and decided to try it myself.
I created a slipstreamed SP3 disc from our University’s volume licensed SP2 disc using nLite. No problem. I then repartitioned my MacBook Pro’s drive using the Boot Camp Assistant and followed Apple’s instructions to the letter. The Windows install, using my SP3 disc, went fine. I did get a black screen after the initial reboot, but manually power cycling the machine gave a clean boot.
I proceeded to install the Boot Camp 2.0 drivers from the Leopard disc. This went mostly smoothly, but the “SM Bus Contoller” was not found in Windows Device Manager. To fix that problem, I re-inserted the Leopard DVD and told it to “repair” the Boot Camp installation. Maddeningly, this robotically proceeded to reinstall every Boot Camp driver. But hey, it fixed the problem! I then used Apple Software Update (which itself had to be updated) to install the Boot Camp 2.1 drivers. You know, the package Apple says should be installed before SP3 — that is true if you’re upgrading from SP2 to SP3. The Boot Camp upgrade took a while, but succeeded. For those who are curious, the NVidia drivers in Boot Camp 2.1 are version 167.73. I still had to run Windows Update to get IE7, WMP11, and a couple of hotfixes on top of SP3, but that’s nothing new under the Sun.
In summary, a Windows XP SP3 slipstreamed disc may successfully be used for a fresh install with Boot Camp.
October 19, 2008 at 8:27 pm |
hello. i also have windows sp3 and also get the black screen. how do i get it to work?
thank you for your help.
January 5, 2009 at 10:07 pm |
I’m not sure what to say to john and “marc” who posted a comment in the wrong section about getting this to work. Tonight, I reinstalled Windows XP SP3 on my Mac. I used the instructions in my post: a slipstreamed WinXP SP3 disc to install, Boot Camp 2.0 drivers from the Leopard install disc, and then immediately upgrading to Boot Camp 2.1 from the Apple Software Update. It’s worked fine. This time around, I didn’t even get a black screen or undetected hardware. November 2007 Santa Rosa MacBook Pro (2.4 GHz). I used nLite for the slipstream.
January 8, 2009 at 3:12 pm |
[...] here’s a post that indicates it’s ok to use SP3… Completing the Cycle: Fresh Boot Camp with Windows XP SP3 « Yocto [...]
January 30, 2009 at 10:54 pm |
I installed WinXp with SP 3 and bootcamp 2.0, then upgraded to 2.1 after solving the SM Bus thing just this post says. But weird enough, now I can’t run the isight webcam on MSN or any other program. Any ideas?