Library Monk

I’ve spent the latter part of this week at work migrating to a new to me Late 2009 21.5 inch iMac. That means my old Early 2009 20 inch iMac was without purpose. Since I didn’t want it getting depressed or anything I decided to use it as a Windows 7 machine. Why you ask? Because I’m the Sharepoint admin for the library and sometimes using Sharepoint on a Mac is unpleasant.

So I formatted the iMac, reinstalled 10.6 and updated it. Then I started up Boot Camp and popped in Windows 7 Enterprise 64-bit DVD.

“Wait!”you say, “that iMac doesn’t support 64-bit Windows 7!” Well, I didn’t realize that at the time. So I happily installed Windows 7, restarted it and proceeded to install the Boot Camp drivers. Then I got a “Boot Camp x64 is unsupported on this computer model” message. Great, now what?

Turns out the solution is pretty simple.

1. Go to Start > Computer. Then right click on your cd/dvd rom drive where the Snow Leopard DVD appears and click open.

2. From there, move to Boot Camp > Drivers > Apple and right click on the file with the name BootCamp64.msi. From the list of options appeared, select Troubleshoot compatibility.

3. Wait a few seconds, and a screen like the following will appear. From this screen click on the “Start the program…” button and the installation process will begin.

4. When the drivers are installed, you’ll need to restart the computer.

5. Enjoy!

You’ll need to run Apple Software update a few times to get to the latest version of Boot Camp but after that everything will work just fine.

I found these instructions at Michael Anastasiou’s site. He also has screen shots. Thanks Michael!