Chris Blackwell's Domain

confessions of a web developer

Posts Tagged ‘Hacks’

Fix for Boot Camp Problem with new 27-inch iMac

Monday, January 11th, 2010

Yesterday I talked about my new 27″ iMac and how I was going to install Windows 7 on it via Boot Camp. I touched on a problem I found when installing Windows, and that was the default driver for the ATI cards.

Windows installs default drivers after installing the Windows kernal. The problem that I experienced was that the default driver Windows installed for the ATI video card was not the correct driver and thus left the screen completely blank. I found that I was not the only one having this problem, and after some Googling around, I came upon a solution that seems to work great.

  1. Reboot your iMac and hold the Option/Alt button down to bring up the boot menu.
  2. Arrow over the the Windows install disc and press Return/Enter
  3. Navigate through the Windows install process until you come across the install options (it’s right after the language selection screen).
  4. Select the Repair your computer option
  5. Choose the C: BOOTCAMP drive
  6. In the list of repair options, find Command Prompt at the bottom and select it
  7. In the command prompt, type of the following command
    del c:\windows\system32\drivers\atikmdag.sys
  8. Close the command prompt and reboot your machine back into your Boot Camp Windows

That’s it! The ATI video driver should be deleted and you are free to install the Apple drivers and Boot Camp software (found on the OSX install disc that came with your machine).

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Boot Your Mac to 64-Bit Automatically

Sunday, November 8th, 2009

Apple made two decisions when launching Snow Leopard this fall. One was to make the entire kernel 64-bit, and the other was to have it default boot to 32-bit mode. I’m not quite sure why they did this, especially with their new line of macs having at least 4GB and in some cases up to 16GB. I always want my machine booting to 64-bit so I can take advantage of the extra memory and because I’m starting to use more and more 64-bit applications.

There has been the much documented solution to hold the “6″ and “4″ buttons down at boot-up, but since I reboot quite often and turn my machines off at night, I’d like an automatic solution. The best solution I found after doing a lot of Googling around was to edit a small file found in

/Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/

In this folder look for the file named

com.apple.Boot.plist

Edit this file in a programming editor such as TextMate or Script Editor. The file by default should look like the following:

<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>Kernel</key>
<string>mach_kernel</string>
<key>Kernel Flags</key>
<string></string>
</dict>
</plist>

Change the 6th line to the following new entry so it appear as follows:

<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>Kernel</key>
<string>mach_kernel</string>
<key>Kernel Flags</key>
<string>arch=x86_64</string>
</dict>
</plist>

Now you can reboot you Mac and it will automatically boot into 64-bit mode. If you have a better or different solution to this please post it in the comments.

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