As anyone who has an Everything Apple Mac these days knows it can be dual booted between Leopard and Windows. Normally this is XP or Vista Windows. Now we have Windows 2008 and with it the lovely Hypervisor.
With a powerful Mac Pro (Laptop or Tower) with lots of lovely memory it would be cool to use Windows 2008 + Hyper-V. There is a snag though….
Macs don’t have a bios they have something called EFI instead. Boot camp uses a bios emulator to get round this but here’s the rub :- if I install Windows 2008 and Hyper-V and then re-boot, Windows 2008 comes up but Hyper-V fails to start. It’s all down to this bios issue.
The solution is straight forward:
1. Install Windows 2008 + Hyper-V onto the Boot camp partition.
2. Shut down
3. When starting the machine hold down the alt/option key until the hard drive ‘choice’ screen appears
4. Choose Leopard
5. Once up and running in Leopard go to System Prefs and choose the Windows disk as the start-up disk
6. Select re-start
7. The system will now boot into Windows and start Hyper-V!!
Success!
It is down to the fact the bios emulator seems to be around longer this way. The system will happily re-boot and apply patchs with Hyper-V continuing to run but after a cold start the above routine must be followed.