Windows 7 on early Macbook?

[boshuter]

I've got one of the early core duo macbooks and want to use Bootcamp to install Windows 7 Pro 32bit (got the $30 student deal from Digital River). I want to do the install from a USB drive which I'll make bootable and put the W7 ISO on it.

I've got a couple of questions before I start;
Anyone have any suggestions to make this as painless as possible?
Does anyone make 3rd party touchpad drivers, I know I'll lose some functionality if I have to depend on the Apple drivers, which pretty much sucked even in OSX.

 

[TheStu]

I put Windows 7 onto my first generation MacBook (Core Duo 1.83GHz), and with the Snow Leopard Boot Camp drivers everything worked exactly as it should.

In order to make it as painless as possible, if you don't already have Windows installed on the hard drive then you will want to clone your drive to an external (after you have made sure you have the sufficient free space) and then clone it back. This will ensure that everything is grouped together on teh drive allowing Disk Utility/Boot Camp Assistant to partition the drive.

I am going to go ahead and assume that you have Leopard or Snow Leopard on there as without them it will be a bit trickier.

I recall that you have increased expectations/needs/whatever with regards to the trackpad, and I have heard that Synaptics drivers will work, but you lose certain other functionality. There is no win/win for you I fear.

 

[boshuter]

I have SL on it now and have a backup, it's a very fresh install to begin with, but I'll take your suggestion and clone it back to the hdd. It's never had windows installed, I swapped the original 80gig for a 250gig and did fresh install of SL.

You are right, I've never been happy with the touchpad, I'm just used to the adjustablility of the ones on my windows laptops I guess. From what I understand, I'll lose the ability to right click with 2 fingers when I use it in Windows. Unless I can get around that I'll probably just grab a bluetooth mouse and see if I can just disable the touchpad alltogether when the mouse is being used.

I'm going to start this project tonight....... will report back when and if it all works!

 

[TheStu]

With the BootCamp drivers from the Snow Leopard disk you will be able to click, tap click, 2 finger click, 2 finger tap click, and 2 finger scroll on that trackpad. And it will work pretty comparably to how it does in OS X which doesn't make it good news for you.

Remind me again what you are looking for in a trackpad. I recall your needs being rather specific and off the wall (in my mind).

 

[boshuter]

I will breifly go into my complaint about the touchpad on this Macbook, but I really don't want this to be a thread on that problem. My orginal complain with the touchpad was it's sensitivity and the lack of any way to adjust that. My other PC laptops have features for the trackpad that I wish the Macbook had, but the sensitivity was the only real "problem" (and still is). BTW, I did a little checking on using the Synaptics drivers, but it seems thats only for Linux users?

Now on the the project. I got it all working fine, but not without some hangups along the way.

I started with clean install of SL on a new 250gig hdd. I used Bootcamp to partition the drive with 50gig for Snow Leopard and the rest for W7.

I ran into the first snag when the Macbook didn't want to boot from a usb drive, something to do with EFI. The USB port would lose power about halfway through the boot process. (more on this later)

I decided to just use a DVD. I was working with a Windows 7 Pro 32bit ISO from the Digital River download. I knew how to make a bootable DVD from an ISO using Nero, but after 3 failed attempts (they would boot, but fail when copying files to the hdd). This was due to the super drive not reading them, all 3 disks worked perfectly in my desktop.

Anyway, I was back to the USB install idea. After some research I found an app that would allow me to boot from a usb device. I used rEFIt, this is an awesome app for multi booting a Mac. The next problem was in making the usb stick (8gig sandisk cruiser) bootable, I tried a few suggestions found on Macrumors forum, but most were just wrong. Finally I found the "Microsoft Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool", this is an excellent app to make a bootable USB device or DVD from a Windows 7 ISO.

The W7 install went off without a hitch until I ran into the well known problem of the Key being rejected because I was doing a clean install with an upgrade version of W7. Both MS and Digital River have posted various remedies for this, I used the registry hack and it worked fine, W7 accepted my Key and the install worked great.

My next challenge was getting the Mac drivers installed in W7. A little backround on my Macbook is needed here; I bought this Macbook on ARS and it came with a fresh install of SL and had Office 2k8 installed as well as a few handy apps. The seller sent me the original install disks for the Macbook, and a burned dvd with SL. When I got it I changed the user account and password and backed up the drive so I could still have the apps that were on the machine in case I had a problem or installed a new hdd in the future. When I put the copy of SL in to load the bootcamp drivers, it would not boot, nor was it recognized in W7. I tried using the original Macbook install disk and it wasn't even Leopard, it was a Tiger disk. At this point I started trying to find the individual drivers online with not much success. I then rememberd I had a set of restore disks from a much newer Macbook that I had bought from Ebay and found out they would not install on my Macbook. I popped that disk in and it booted right up in W7 and installed the bootcamp assistant and drivers.

Once the drivers were installed everything seems to be functioning fine, the isight camera is working, sound is louder than it is when running in OSX, graphics are fine, etc., the only thing I haven't been able to test is wireless connectivity with the airport extreme card, but I don't anticipate any problems.

All in all, it was a success, I can now use the Macbook for more than web surfing. I got Autocad 2009 installed and it runs well considering the hardware specs, I'm sure Mastercam will be ok as well.

The only issue (here we go again), is the touchpad. I can use 2 finger scrolling, but there are no tap features, 1 or 2 finger. I'll update the drivers to the newest bootcamp drivers, but from what I've read, the "non-multi touch pads" are not supported and the newer drivers will not help this problem. I'm hoping that I can find a way to just disable the touchpad and use a bluetooth mouse. As a last resort, I'll unplug the cable to the touchpad inside the machine, it's a real pita to type on this machine the way this touchpad works now.

 

[mmntech]

Just be aware that you need an existing copy of vista installed to take advantage of the student deal. It's only an upgrade version.

Basically, if it can run vista, it can run windows 7. 7 is backwards compatible with vista's drivers, so the ones on the leopard/snow leopard discs will work fine. As for the trackpad issues, apple did address that with a driver update. You can get it from their bootcamp support page, or on the snow leopard disc.

 

[boshuter]

Just be aware that you need an existing copy of vista installed to take advantage of the student deal. It's only an upgrade version.

Basically, if it can run vista, it can run windows 7. 7 is backwards compatible with vista's drivers, so the ones on the leopard/snow leopard discs will work fine. As for the trackpad issues, apple did address that with a driver update. You can get it from their bootcamp support page, or on the snow leopard disc.

Well you are wrong about needing Vista, and you are wrong about the new drivers fixing the touchpad issues............ but at least you are consistent.

If you read the post, I did a clean install with the upgrade download, I've never used Vista.

The trackpad issues addressed in the new drivers are for the newer multi-touch trackpads, not the older one on my Macbook.

 

[VinylxScratches]

I was able to do a clean install of Win7 Business Student Deal on a Virtual Box VM and it did not require Vista.

 

[TheStu]

I didn't want to do a huge block quote...

I unfortunately no longer have my Core Duo MacBook to test this, but I am 99% sure that if you can get your hands on the Snow Leopard drivers they should give you tap clicking. It is not enabled by default, you have to go to Control Panel -> Boot Camp to modify them.

I had never tried the USB stick installation, and did not notice when you originally said that, so I couldn't offer any advice, but if you had burned the ISO from OS X it very probably would have worked (at least I have never had a problem burning ISOs from there).

Yes, the original MacBooks and MacBook Pros shipped with Tiger.

You cannot disconnect just the trackpad. The trackpad, keyboard and power button all have their cabling run through the same ribbon and connect with the same connector on the logic board. If you were to open it up you would find that. However, the trackpad is USB, so you can just disable it in Hardware Manager in Windows.

 

[boshuter]

TheStu- I'll get the SL bootcamp drivers tomorrow and see if they enable the tapping. All the reports of I've found so far on some of the other Mac forums make me doubt that it will work. The guys with the newer multitouch pads have the tap to click function, but the older ones like mine just don't work. I can do 2 finger scrolling in Windows, but it's very erratic, which the drivers may fix. To do right click in Windows now I have to hold 2 fingers on the pad and click with my thumb.... takes some getting used to, but not all that bad.

I really think the problems with the ISOs I burned was my superdrive not reading them. I could not burn them in OSX because the superdrive in the older Macbooks is not DL capable. After doing it this way, I like the USB option much better, it's faster and getting the rEFIt installed was worth it. When I boot the laptop, any bootable drives, internal or external show up and I can choose which to boot to.

 

[TheStu]

You can also hold ALT on a non-rEFIt Mac to bring up the boot menu.

 

[boshuter]

You can also hold ALT on a non-rEFIt Mac to bring up the boot menu.

I know about that, that worked fine when I was trying to install W7 from a DVD, but it doesn't work if you are trying to install from a USB drive. Now that W7 is installed, I probably don't need rEFIt, but I'm all for anything that gives me more options that is built in.