Kiddosr, or anyone for that matter... has it been confirmed that the loader doesn't work with the 2tb (equipped) iMac? This is what I have, and I too have the same experience using win7 loader 1.93.
Thanks for that FreeStyler. Not to sound ungrateful (to all the work people have already put in) but is this something on the table to be fixed? Can this be fixed? I'm gonna look at that link, again thanks.
Don't think so... the limitation is in the original Grub4DOS code, active development of that code seems to have stagnated
I see... well that is unfortunate. I'm new to Win7 and the new ways to defeat activation. That link you posted is a little (or a lot) above my head. I'm not a programmer (however I'm not computer illiterate either), and I don't recognize the acronyms mentioned throughout it. Can you recommend a place to begin reading up on this stuff? I haven't even been able to find a good definition of was SLIC is. Thanks for your help.
Apparently it will work as long as the drive doesn't contain any GPT partitions. It's also been said that a hybrid MBR may work but it's risky to do
Stupid question Daz, but isn't a GPT the type of partition created Bootcamp? If so, I'm kind of back in a rock and a hard place... no?
Hi Everyone. My first post. Lots of great info on here. Kudos to all the experts for guiding us lesser "knowledged" folk down the Windows 7 path! I'm also in the iMac with a 2TB hd category... But i also have the additional 256 GB SSD option as well... Has anyone tested to see if partitioning the SSD with bootcamp will do the trick? Your thoughts would be much appreciated. Cheers, K
Mac Pro - No SLIC error First off thanks Daz for your loader, I was able to get it working 1st try on my MacBook Pro. Now I'm trying to get it going on my Mac Pro but not having any luck. This is a fresh Windows 7 Pro 64bit install and I have tried 3 times with the same result. First time I chose Acer, then Dell, then Acer again. Each time the loader install went smoothly however on reboot I get the attached screenshot error stating "No SLIC - Pointer" and "Boot failed". I am able to boot it up by going into repair mode and running "bootsect /nt60 SYS" but it does not activate. I reinstalled the OS twice also. Can anyone help me to get this going? My Mac has 3 disks, the first two are a 640GB RAID mirror and the 3rd is a 1.5TB GPT with a HFS+ and the NTFS bootcamp partition.
@ macster Which of the drives is Windows 7 found on? It's just that large sized disks when in combination with GPT appears to have problems. Putting Windows 7 on a drive that's NTFS and has it's BCD/bootmgr on that NTFS drive and the loader might just work. A few posts back I gave links which may or may not help. I'm not sure if anyones experimented and can confirm which of the solutions works best and is the easiest to perform.
Hello Daz, my Win7 NTFS is on my third disk which is 1.5TB size (disk2s3 to be precise). I thought the size problem was only for 2GB+? I can probably reformat that disk to not be GPT since I don't really need to boot OSX from it... my RAID is on the first 2 disks. Do you think that would fix the problem? Code: $ diskutil list /dev/disk0 #: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER 0: GUID_partition_scheme *640.1 GB disk0 1: EFI 209.7 MB disk0s1 2: Apple_RAID 639.8 GB disk0s2 3: Apple_Boot Boot OSX 134.2 MB disk0s3 /dev/disk1 #: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER 0: GUID_partition_scheme *640.1 GB disk1 1: EFI 209.7 MB disk1s1 2: Apple_RAID 639.8 GB disk1s2 3: Apple_Boot Boot OSX 134.2 MB disk1s3 /dev/disk2 #: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER 0: GUID_partition_scheme *1.5 TB disk2 1: EFI 209.7 MB disk2s1 2: Apple_HFS Backup 1.4 TB disk2s2 3: Microsoft Basic Data BOOTCAMP 30.0 GB disk2s3 4: Apple_HFS Extra 69.8 GB disk2s4 /dev/disk3 #: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER 0: Apple_HFS Macintosh HD *639.8 GB disk3 An fdisk on disk2 shows slice 3 is active and Windows 7 boots fine until I apply the loader. With the loader I get the SLIC pointer error. Thanks!
Well 2TB is the size that triggered off the initial investigation and as the loader is based on GRUB all we actually do is add the code to handle the SLIC stuff. So when I say GPT is the problem then thats from what I've read online which may or may not be accurate. If you're willing to modify your setup to not use GPT then I can't promise if that will make any difference but I see no reason for it not to fix the problem.
I'm running Windows 7 via Bootcamp on my Mac Pro. Everything has been working fine for almost a year now except the annoying "this copy of Windows is not genuine" prompts. My Mac Pro is from 2006, so the initial installation required a lot of troubleshooting. 1) Is the Windows Loader worth trying on my system? 2) How can I back up my entire Windows Bootcamp partition in case the Windows Loader doesn't work. I have lots of software/ plug-ins that take days to install. *Note: I tried a Wat file when first installing Windows 7 earlier this year. It didn't work at all, and just caused a black screen on reboot. Had to wipe out the partition, and re-install Windows 7 from scratch... 3 times. This is why I'd like to know all the risks first! *Note2: My drive is 300Gb with 260Gb partitioned to Windows. I posted this same info in "Windows Loader The Official Thread", but want to get some feedback in the Mac forum too. The first suggestion I received on the other forum was, "install with the default boot menu from the advanced options". Thoughts?
If I had to hazard a guess I'd say it'd work. If it didn't work then as long as you can boot the DVD/ISO then you can use the bootsect.exe /nt60 SYS /force command (from the repair options / command prompt) to restore the system back to booting order.
My only concern with needing to perform any recovery is that when I installed the Wat earlier this year, I was left with a black screen. After rebooting, windows was unresposive to any kind of keyboard commands, and I don't believe I was able to boot from DVD entirely. This was because it wouold say, "press any key to continue", but didn't recognize my keyboard or drivers. Assuming that I would need use of my keyboard to ececute the bootsect.exe /nt60 SYS /force command, right?
@WindowsLoaderGuy The Loader only modifies the bootup and not any system files so if you run into a problem like I did then you just boot from a repair disk or install DVD and get a command prompt. From there you can fix the boot loader with the command mentioned. Your keyboard and other hardware should still work fine.
@macster. Ok cool. I'll try making a repair disk first, and see if I still have keyboard use after loading into it. To be clear, it's not that I can't re-boot from the DVD at all. It's that once I select it, I no longer have keyboard functionality. I also forgot to mention that when Windows 7 force crashes and does that whole "press any key within 30 seconds to skip or check for errors" on reboot with my current setup, my keyboard is unresponsive until I'm actually inside the OS again. May have to do with the 2006 Mac Pros not supporting 64 bit Winodws 7. I had no issues running the 32 bit version, but didn't like the ram limitations.
2 TB HDD upgrade on iMac I upgraded my iMac hard drive from 400GB to 2TB and tried the 7 Loader on a fresh BootCamp 32 bit install and it gave me the same error I believe that macster received. Has anyone been able to get their copy activated on a 2TB drive. Being that I am using an iMac, only one hard drive is practical for me and I only had the 2TB lying around. Any help would be appreciated.