Installing Windows 10 pro onto an older Mac Pro

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So I have this 2006 Mac Pro 1,1 that I’ve had laying around and I wanted to put my old Nvidia 1030 into it, along with Windows 10 for a newer (stronger?) home machine.

So I burnt the downloadable ISO from Microsoft onto a DVD, tried to boot it up and got this:

Ignore the microwave…

I got stuck at this “Select CD-ROM Boot Type : ” prompt, which you can’t type anything into. Apparently it’s a common and known issue with 64bit boot code, as the older Intel Apple Mac’s are of course 32bit only. So there is a fix, you have to use something called “oscdimg” to rebuild the ISO with a 32bit friendly loader.

So first I just used 7zip to extract the downloaded ISO, and then create the new 32bit ISO with the following:

oscdimg -n -m -bc:\temp\Windows10\boot\etfsboot.com c:\temp\Windows10 c:\temp\LegacyBootWindows10dvd.iso

And yes, it boots!

Brigadier

Now what about those special ‘bootcamp’ drivers? Obviously under Windows 10 there is no nice way to get the ones you want. And what about which model/download package to get?

Then I found Brigadier!

It’ll probe your hardware type and grab the drivers for you!

https://github.com/timsutton/brigadier/releases

14 thoughts on “Installing Windows 10 pro onto an older Mac Pro”

  1. I installed Windows 10 on a MacMini1,1 with a broken CD drive via some stupid Boot Camp tricks: run Boot Camp to make the Windows partition, select the USB installer when it reboots… (which is uh, finicky) and the Boot Camp CSM doesn’t provide USB input emulation, and my Windows 10 install disk was dual arch, so it booted into the default option…. 64-bit. That wouldn’t work on a Core Solo. So then I edit the BCD to default to 32-bit instead, and Windows 10 just hums along. Then I slowly installed the Boot Camp drivers.

    Hilariously, it’s not as bad as you’d think it’d be! Once it loads, it’s tolerable as it’d get for a ~5200 RPM spinning disk.

    • As much as I liked the idea of XNU, the NT kernel really does perform better on MAC branded hardware. Then again it’s nice to take such an ‘obsolete’ machine condemned to 10.7 as a maximum and run build 1809 without any further issues.

  4. Awesome work on getting Windows 10 Pro installed on a older Mac Pro! 😀

    I can’t seem to get networking to work right under OS/2 2.0. I’m using 86Box build 1837 (latest build) and I really would appreciate your help.

    For example, when I use Gopher 1.61 under OS/2 2.0, I get a “gopher.floodgap.com: uknown host” error: https://imgur.com/a/Y9Hps1e

    And I can’t seem to access and sites via telnet either. 🙁

    Here’s my current CONFIG.SYS file: https://pastebin.com/Lf9xkKdK
    Here’s my current PROTOCOL.INI file: https://pastebin.com/cG3MUj01

    And here is my current TCP/IP settings: https://imgur.com/a/ZpkDzVC

    I’m wondering if it would be possible to provide a step-by-step OS/2 2.0 TCP/IP installation using SLIRP and a ISA NE2000 NIC.

    Thank you for your time. 🙂

  5. I just made a fresh install following these instructions….
    Woaw !!!!
    It works like a charm on an old Mac Pro 1.1 2×2.66 Xeon with 8GB RAM
    This more than 10 years old hardware perform like a rocket
    Many Thanks Neozeed !

    • Super glad to hear!!!

      Order new processors if you can, going to the 3ghz was a nice improvement.

      I’d probably still say take the CPU heatsink apart as mine was so incredibly dirty and the thermal compound was totally dried out and ineffective.

      Otherwise, add in some SSD, and a GPU and yeah it’s a great machine!

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