Over time, the process should get easier and safer, but as of today, it’s still highly experimental. If you have but one Mac, and you rely on it to make a living, I would not recommend installing Windows XP on it just yet. In short, this is very new technology, and things can still go very wrong with the process.
#Running windows xp on macbook driver#
Finally, something as simple as installing a new driver in Windows XP may render XP unbootable, and recovering from that may require starting over again-including formatting the drive and installing both OS X and Windows XP. Thankfully, recovery is relatively straightforward, though you will lose all data on the machine. It’s also possible to wind up in a situation where you have an unusable OSX, an unusable Windows XP, and the OS X installer refuses to see your drive as an available destination-in fact, this happened to me twice. I’m not sure if permanent damage is possible-I don’t think that it is-but you can easily get in a position where you might need to boot into single-user mode to recover. If you’re thinking about trying this on your own Intel-based Mac, you should know that Really Bad Things are possible. This isn’t meant to be an installation guide, but I will talk about installing the patch, discuss what it takes to get XP working, the risks involved in a project such as this, and finally, how well the finished product works. What follows is a description of my experience, both good and bad, with the entire process from start to finish.
#Running windows xp on macbook install#
After drawing the short straw volunteering to help out, I set out to see what it would take to install the hack, get XP up and running on my Intel-powered Mac mini, and then see what kind of Windows XP machine I had on my hands.
That contest, to get the Microsoft operating system running on an Intel-based Mac, has been won, meaning it’s now at least theoretically possible to run Windows natively on your Intel-based Mac (while still retaining a separate OS X installation). What’s next-Windows XP running on an Apple-built machine? Exactly, thanks to the Windows XP on Intel Mac challenge.
First, Intel-built processors wind up in the Mac.