Installing Vista 64-bit on a MacBook

Today, I spent a small amount of time working on installing Vista x64 on my 2 year old MacBook. This is a non-trivial task since 64 bit drivers are not always easy to find. In fact, just 6 months ago, I attempted and finally did get my MacPro updated to Vista x64. Drivers were an issue at that time also.

The reason for wanting to put Vista SP1 x64 on my MacBook was pretty straightforward; I needed to have Vista on a machine I could be mobile with in my work. At home, I am testing out Windows Hyper-V Server and need a Vista client to manage the Hyper-V. My MacBook has been super reliable and it has Mac OS X Leopard on the hard drive already. I have also had Windows XP Pro installed during the past couple years for testing at times. Now on to Vista!

The first step is to use the latest version of BootCamp in your Mac OS X Utility folder and give yourself some partitioned hard drive space. In my case, 50 GB is plenty out of 230 GB. With the appropriately built Vista ISO image, I restarted the MacBook to boot from the Vista DVD and got to work. I formatted the 50 GB partition to NTFS and installed Vista x64. In about 30 minutes, the machine booted to a login screen and it was time to see the driver issues I was to face.

After login to Vista x64, I went to the Manage Devices interface and looked at the drivers yet to be installed. The iSight camera, wireless network and something called “Performance Counters” needed drivers. After looking at several posts and recalling the BootCamp 2.1 driver set from the spring of 2008, I looked at using those drivers to solve some of my issues.

As it turns out, the iSight, Apple Null driver, and Bluetooth driver all installed and cleared up the driver issues except for the wireless network card. I posted a request for help on the Apple Discussion threads and continued to search for ideas from other Apple folks on the discussion boards. No luck was found here in the discussion boards.

What I found out from further research is that the Apple MacBook uses the Atheros M35b which is a bad naming convention. Perhaps this is done to confuse the Apple techie wanna-be. I am not sure of the reasons, but I found a way around the confusion. I cross referenced the Atheros WiFi chipset series using Google’s search engine and found that the Atheros 54xx series covered the chipset used by Apple’s MacBook series with 802.11 a/b/g.

I was able to go to the Atheros site, but downloading drivers there is not easy; Atheros like to publish specs and white papers, but not provide driver support or downloads. At least I never found any evidence of an easy to find link to drivers. So, I used Google again and found the latest drivers for Atheros 5xxx series wireless chipsets.

After unpacking the compressed archive file called atheros_7.3.1.73, three folders were left on my desktop. The ndis6x folder contained the correct drivers for the Apple MacBook that I use. It should be noted that my MacBook was a Fall 2006 model and other MacBook models manufactured in 2007 and 2008 may use Broadcom wireless chipsets. You have been warned to check out your own MacBook.

I hope that as you work on your installation of Vista or the Apple MacBook, that you have the best of luck in making a fine laptop computer into a multiple OS powerhouse. Good luck.