Windows 8 and the iMac

Our trusty old iMac has been in use for a while now, without having had the luxury of regular updates to the latest operating system. It was running Loepard, 10.5.8 I think, and there were quite a few apps that don't run on this dated OS.

Apple's word processor being the most annoying one.
The upgrade process involved something coming via snail mail as iTunes would only install music (apologies if this isn't correct, but I got fed up trying to work out how to get Lion installed via a download).

So with Microsoft offering cheap Windows 8 licenses, it had to be worth a go didn't it?

It wasn't entirely plain sailing though.

First I discovered that we had a 9,1 iMac, which did support x64 versions of Windows, which was nice.

Second the version of Bootcamp didn't support installing from a USB drive, and I couldn't find any DVDs about the house.

What I did was run Bootcamp 2.0, which still partitioned the HD perfectly for me, and then tried to re-boot and get the Mac to run from a USB image of the Win8 ISO.

The next problem was that the iMac doesn't boot to USB natively and I needed to install rEFIt, from here.

rEFIt worked perfectly and when you plug in the USB drive and reboot a couple of times you get a menu to choose where you want to boot from.

After a half an hour or so, BINGO, Windows 8 was installed.

Then there are a couple of things to tidy up. To boot to Window 8 automatically you need to go into OSX and choose the default boot partition from the system preferences, and you will have a better Windows 8 experience if you download the Bootcamp drivers which Chris Carrol had documented here.

NB You need 7-Zip V4.65 to extract pkg files.

Enjoy.