I haven't really had the time to move machines and the computer I've been using is a decent Dell Precision T5400 with 8GB of RAM, 2x 3.16GHz, 2Tb of disk space and so on. Not too bad really. It works great for running the ESRI ArcGIS (ArcInfo) suite, Erdas Imagine, and of course the MS Office suite. But, I do need to pass the machine onto one of our employees who is using a 6y/o Dell workstation. I, therefore (and I thought logically), decided I would install Win7 on one of the Mac drives because as great as a Mac may be, it isn't going to run the apps I need.
I started the Bootcamp assistant, selected the drive, tossed the Win7 64-bit disk in the "optical" drive and away I went. For a good 45 seconds. And then I ran into the first error:
1.
2.
Select CD-ROM Boot Type: _[blinking cursor]_
Ok, no big deal, I'll hit a number and see what happens... Nothing.
Figures. Keyboard input is a no-go
So, I turn things on and off a half-dozen times, reformat the drive I want to use... no dice. Finally, I turn to Google for the answer. Luckily, I wasn't alone in finding this error - but the solution did take about a full extra hour and a half to get working.
I wanted to cite Sergio McFly's blog post and credit it with the final solution to the mess. Note that the post is written for Server2008, I just substituted that with windows7 and worked out of a temp folder on my C drive - it worked beautifully. I've copied and pasted here, adding slight modifications as I used it:
Solution:
(I created a c:\temp folder to work from)
0 - create 3 folders c:\temp\windows7iso c:\temp\windows7exe c:\temp\windows7dvd
1 - download this .exe file and put into c:\temp\windows7exe
2 - put .iso you downloaded from ms into c:\temp\windows7iso and unzip it
3 - move .iso file out of c:\temp\windows7iso
4 - open a dos prompt in c:\temp\windows7exe and type:
oscdimg -n -m -b c:\temp\windows7iso\boot\etfsboot.com c:\temp\windows7iso c:\temp\windows7dvd\windows7dvd.iso
The windows7dvd.iso is the file [you are going to] burn onto a new DVD
Enjoy !
I did want to mention that I used PowerISO to re-burn my disk to use in the Mac... and as I look at the screen now, it appears that the install worked. Time will tell how it runs.
