One thing leads to another…
No good deed goes unpunished…
I’ve been using a Win XP-based Asus Netbook with my Yaesu FT817 and SignaLink USB to run Ham Radio Deluxe and Joe Large’s JT65-HF program. Despite the diminutive screen and single-core Atom CPU, the Netbook seemed up to the task. And as I was building an emergency ham radio ‘bug-out-bag’, a small laptop that runs off of 13.8 VDC seemed ideal. 16AH worth of SLA Batteries and a folding 20 watt solar panel went into the bag along with the radio gear and Netbook.
When I decided to experiment with JT65-HF and my IC-9100, things got complicated. It turns out the Icom USB drivers under WinXP will not allow you to adjust the Radio to PC audio level (nor does the IC-9100 itself — a major shortcoming). However Win7 always includes basic slider controls for the inbound sources.
Since Microsoft was running a special Win7 Home Premium Upgrade promotion (3 PC updates for the price of one – I figured I would use one of the updates on the Netbook. This turned into a weekend-long horror show getting the Win7 update installed. Most of the difficulty centered around finding and installing all the required updates for the Asus netbook — including a BIOS update (that was supposed to be installed BEFORE Win7 was installed, but you don’t know that until you get an error message).
Eventually after at least 20 hours of trying, I had an Asus Netbook that would boot into Win7 64-bit. However, the internal netbook speakers would not work at all — my netbook would only produce audio through the headphone jack. Otherwise it was deaf and dumb – something that was anoying but I could live with.
As I installed more and more radio related software, it became apparent that the netbook was not up to the task (the small low-resolution screen was the problem). I briefly considered buying another small netbook-like device with an 11-inch display, but figured it wasn’t worth the headache. Then I remembered a retired MacBook late-2009 edition that had a Core 2 Duo CPU at 2.2 GHz, SSD, and 4 GB of RAM, and a pre-existing WinXP Boot Camp installation on it.
I figured copy 2 of my 3 copy Win7 update was going on the MacBook. Everything I read seemed to indicate I was good to run Win7 64-bit, so I fired up Boot Camp Assistant, put my update disc into the MacBook drive and told it to install Windows.
I was greeted with a few seconds of disk spinning, thne a prompt appeared on the screen that asked me to pick a CD-ROM boot option; 1 or 2 (with no other text shown) and the machine locked up. Google was my friend, yet again, and I discovered the reason for the hang. Microsoft uses a non-standard directory structure on their DVDs that doesn’t play well with Apple. They know this and have documented a way around it that involves using the update disk as a source to create an ISO file containing all the files from the update disk. To use this requires a Win7 machine, which I happened to have, plus a program called oscdimg.exe, available for download from Microsoft.
With a copy of that program, plus the original Microsoft DVD with the Win7 Update the following must be done:
- Create 3 folders c:iso c:exe c:dvd
- Download oscdimg.exe from Microsoft and put it in c:exe
- Copy all the contents of the DVD to c:dvd (it is about 3.5 GB)
- Start up a command prompt (Start -> Run -> cmd)
- Type: cd c:exe
- Type: oscdimg -n -m -bc:dvdbootetfsboot.com c:dvd c:isoWin764.iso
You can then use the ISO file in the c:iso directory along with your favorite DVD authoring software (like Nero), to burn the ISO to a DVD.
Using the new Win7 64-bit DVD with Boot Camp Assistant in the Mac mode will now work, and after about 30 minutes you will be rewarded with a working copy of Win7 on your MacBook Boot Camp partition.
Yet the story doesn’t end there. When you try to install the Boot Camp drivers that come on the Snow Leopard installation disk, you will get a warning that the drivers won’t work with Win7 64-bit. In my case, that is untrue, and it works fine with the MacBook circa late 2009. To get them to run, however, requires another sleight of hand.
Put the disk back into the drive and dismiss the error message “Boot Camp x64 is unsupported on this computer model.”. Open the DVD and move to the Boot CampDriversApple folder. Find the “BootCamp64.msi” file and right-click on it. Pick “Troubleshoot compatibility”, which will disable the Win7 Version check. Finally press “Start the program…” to start the installation of the Apple drivers.
A few resets later you will be presented with a working Win7 64-bit boot camp partition. Update the Boot Camp drivers to 3.2 (the Snow Leopard DVD comes with Boot Camp 3.1).
