Hackintosh from Start to Finish (Part 6): What About Windows?

If you've been keeping up with my series, then you should have a very functional hackintosh system! If you're new to my series, I highly recommend watching Part 1 before jumping right into any of the other videos.

As you read from the title of this blog post, this part of my "Hackintosh From Start to Finish" series is going to be all about Windows. If you're like me, then you've been using OS X as your primary OS for some time now. I haven't had the need to run any Windows apps in a long time. With that said, it's important to realize that everybody has different needs for their computer. Maybe you love using OS X, but every one in awhile you're forced to use a Windows application for either school or work. How can you do this on a hackintosh? In this post, I give you the two best options there are. 

The two methods I recommend are using Parallels Desktop, or dual booting with Windows. Both of these are viable solutions to the common problem, however the difficulty involved and the price are what separate the two. If you watch the above video, I take you on a Tour of Parallels Desktop 7, highlighting some of the key features. At the end of the day, Parallels is just a virtual machine. Although it's probably the best virtual machine out there, it still can't unlock your computer's full performance. That's where dual booting comes into play. I also show you a complete tutorial on dual booting Windows 7 with mac OS X Lion. Let's get started with explaining Parallels Desktop a little more in-depth.

Parallels Desktop 7

What's needed to use Parallels Desktop?

• Parallels Desktop
• A copy of Windows (or other OS)

The simplest way to run those few Windows applications is to use Parallels Desktop 7. Going this route has some benefits, including:

• No need to restart to boot into Windows
• Run Windows and Mac apps simultaneously
• Use Windows in a variety of different modes

These benefits may be enough for the majority of Mac OS X users. Using Parallels saves time by being able to run on top of Mac OS X. This saves the user from having to restart their computer, halting whatever they're doing on OS X. The user can even drag and drop files between Mac and Windows apps. This is a huge productivity booster. Windows can also be run in modes, such as coherence or full screen. Coherence mode allows the user to hide the Windows desktop. This mode puts the start menu in the menubar under a Parallels icon. Once right-clicked, the start menu drops down, allowing an application to be selected. In this mode, only the applications are shown, as seen in the picture below:

Personally, this is one of my favorite features of Parallels Desktop. The ability to run applications from two different operating system at the same time is a priceless feature, and I'm sure one that everyone can appreciate. Before deciding if you want to dual boot or not, give Parallels a try. The company offers a free trial on their website, so don't hesitate to try it out and see if it fits your needs.

Dual Booting

With all that said, Parallels Desktop isn't for everyone. What if you want to play Crysis 2 at full resolution? What if you want to edit 1080p footage on Windows? This simply won't work for you, especially if you have a mid-range system. This is where it will be necessary to dual boot with Windows. This process takes some more work than Parallels does, but it's worth it in the end. So what are the benefits of dual booting?

• Uses your system's full potential
• Less room for errors than a virtual machine
• Dual display setups can be used

  The rest of this post is going to assume that you want to dual boot your computer. I'm going to give a full tutorial on how the process works. First things first; what's needed to dual boot with Windows?

• A copy of Windows
• A bootloader (on USB or CD) that can boot you into Mac OS X
• MultiBeast

I've gotten loads of questions asking if OS X can be installed with a Windows partition already running. The short answer is yes. If you plan to have Windows on a separate hard drive, then this is absolutely possible. You'll run into issues when installing OS X to a different partition on the same hard drive. This is because Windows most likely formatted the hard disk as MBR. To keep it short, OS X doesn't like MBR partition tables. If you manage to get OS X installed on an MBR drive, you won't be able to modify any of the partitions on that drive.  At the end of the day, I highly recommend that you install Windows to a completely different hard drive! This will make your life worlds easier! Assuming that you have everything you'll need and that you've followed part 4 of my series, let's get started. If you haven't watched part 4, I highly recommend it, as I show you how to create a bootable Lion flash drive using UniBeast. I'll be starting this guide from an installation of Mac OS X Lion, and I recommend that you do the same.

In Mac OS X, open up disk utility and select the hard disk that you want to install Windows to. If you want to partition the drive, click the partition tab near the top and do so however you please. With the drive/partition that you want to install Windows to, make sure that the format is FAT32. This will be changed back into NTFS once we're actually installing Windows. We're selecting FAT32 here because it's the only format on the list that the Windows installer will recognize. Once everything looks good, click "Apply" at the bottom of the window. Your drive is now set up for installing Windows! At this point, I recommend shutting your computer down and removing or unplugging any drives that you won't be using. This is to reduce the possibility of making an error.

At this point, you want to go into your computers BIOS and make sure that your hard drive boot priority is set to the drive that you have Mac OS X installed on. To do this, boot into you computers BIOS by hitting the appropriate key on startup (this varies from motherboard to motherboard). Once in the BIOS, you should have a menu called something along the lines of "Advanced BIOS Features". Go into this menu, noting the drive priority option. Simply put the drive that you've installed Mac OS X to at the top. Once that's done, exit your BIOS, making sure that you save the changes.

What we're going to be doing next is simply installing Windows. There's no tricks or loops here. Restart your computer, insert your Windows DVD, and boot from it. Once you're at the installation screen, simply click through the menus, making sure that you click "custom install". After that screen, you'll be greeted with a disk selection screen. Note the partition that you created using Disk Uility. Highlight that partition and click "format" at the bottom of the screen. Once you hit ok, your drive will be ready to install Windows on to! Proceed with the installation, noting that the machine needs to restart a few times during the installation.

This part is very important, so read it carefully! There are two options at this point:

• You're installing Windows to a separate drive 
• You're installing Windows and OS X to the same drive

If you're installing Windows to the same hard drive as OS X, then you're all set and can proceed with the installation. If you're installing Windows to a separate hard drive, this is where you're going to run into problems. Since you set your boot priority to boot from your OS X installation first, you're going to come to the Chimera menu when you boot up. Your natural reaction to this is to stop the timer and boot back into windows. It's crucial that you don't do this. 

This will give you all kinds of errors, causing the installation to fail, making you to repeat the entire process. What you need to do instead is to boot into your "boot devices" menu. This is similar to the BIOS, as there's a certain key to press to get to the menu. Once you're at the menu, you should see an option to boot from your hard drive. Since you have more than one, it will ask you which one to boot into. You want to select the hard drive that you installed Windows to. When you install a copy of Windows, it also installs its own bootloader to that hard drive along with it. If you try to complete the installation using a different bootloader, then it will fail, leaving you clueless as to why this happened. You need to do this every time the computer restarts during the installation process, which means that you have to watch the installation and make sure that you boot into the other hard drive whenever the computer restarts. Once Windows has finished installing, you will be able to use Chimera to boot into Windows or OS X.

Once Windows has finished installing, continue through the setup process until you get to the desktop. If you installed Windows to a separate hard drive, you are done! You can restart the computer and select what OS you'd like from Chimera. However, I'm going to assume that you installed both OS X and Windows to the same drives from here on out. Simply insert your bootloader into your machine and restart. When you get the chance, boot from whichever device has your bootloader and boot into Mac OS X. Once you're booted into Mac OS X, fire up MultiBeast. All you need to install is Chimera. When MultiBeast finishes installing Chimera, restart your computer and feel free to boot into either Mac OS X or Windows!

I hope this post has helped you. If you feel like being awesome, check me out on Youtube and Twitter!