Neosmart seems to be getting a whole heap of links for their theory on how to boot Windows XP on an Intel Mac. Sounds great, right? Just one problem, leaving aside the whole part about the MacBook not shipping yet so there being no way to verify this, their method just ain’t going to work as written.
1. Using the Bootable Acronis Disk Director CD on the MacBook, shrink the Mac partition. Create a new partition of type NTFS/HPFS in the remaining space.
Uhm, and just how did we boot Acronis again? If it can boot on an Intel Mac they certainly forgot to mention anything about it on their website. Not a mention of EFI that I can see. Note only that, but Acronis doesn’t know anything about HFS+ so you won’t be resizing an HFS+ partition with it, you’d corrupt the filesystem beyond recognition. So it looks like even at step 1 we’re out of luck.
Steps 2-15 are done on a generic PC that can already boot Windows XP so we can ignore them.
16. In Mac now, hack the Darwin Bootloader to add another entry that chainloads Drive(0) Partition(2). With GRUB it would look something like this… I’m not sure if Darwin is the same, but this step is very simple, and has nothing to do with EFI.
title Windows XP
rootnoverify (hd0,1)
chainloader +1
Well the Darwin bootloader bears no resemblence to GRUB. The Darwin bootloader on PowerPC Macs and on the old x86 Darwin version basically just boots Darwin. No options, you’re getting Darwin. There’s no magic chainloader option in every previous version of the Darwin bootloader, so don’t go expecting that it suddenly exists for Intel Macs.
Nobody has yet to even get Vista to boot on an Intel Mac (the best anyone has gotten is the “Press Any Key to boot from CD” message), so how the Vista files are magically helping I’m not sure either.
There’s very little relating to an Intel Mac in the article, just wild theories that to be honest just don’t make any sense. This is an article to take with a large dose of sodium chloride.