OK, I have am old Mac Mini (late 2010) that has two 500GB hard drives and on DVD. So how do I get it so that one disk is Mac OS X and the other runs Windows 7 Ultimate Edition so that I can run Windows Media Center and get my HD Homerun Prime working so I can distribute DVR content across my home. Well, it is more complicated than you think. Here are the steps:
- First you need to get a disk image of Windows 7 Ultimate (there are 7! different versions of Windows, but ever version beyond Home Basic has the Windows Media Center, I picked Ultimate because what the heck :-). You either have to rip it into an ISO or find it some other way.
- Now you get your USB flash drive and stick it into the Mac OS X. The trick here is that I don’t have any Windows machines, so I can’t do the equivalent of the old DOS (format b: /s) to get this done.
- Instead here is what you have to do, go to Disk Utility, and Erase the USB and make sure it is formatted as MS-DOS FAT.
- Now unmount the drive by choosing Unmount there.
- Start Boot Camp Assistant and select download drivers and this will dump a directory call “WindowsSupport”
- Now start the terminal and find out what is the /dev/disk number for the actual hardware with the “diskutil list” command, it should be something like /dev/disk2
- Now go to finder and search for iso in find and type, “dd if=”
- Now drag the name of your file from the Finder into your terminal windows and magically the long character file name complete this
- So now the thing should look like, “dd if=/users/Name/Downloads/Windows7.iso of=/dev/disk2 bs=1m
- The trick is the bs=1m and when you hit enter, you will be a bootable USB key
- Drag and drop the WindowsSupport folder into that USB key
- Now reboot the Mac and hold down the option key, you should see the USB key as one of the devices to boot from.
- You will install windows and hopefully it has enough drivers to start running
- When you are done, find you USB key and run setup.exe form the WindowsSupport folder on your USB key
- Keep the key around in case you need it again 🙂
