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Anyone Successfully Installed Windows 2000 On Mac Pro?


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On 7/5/2016 at 2:07 PM, jaclaz said:

As a side-side note (and for future readers) a "normal" install of 2K Professional (but I don't think that Advanced Server is that much different) takes about 650 Mb of hard disk space, when doing experiments a 3 or 4 Gb partition/volume, 10 Gb if you really want to overdo it, is much more than enough, there is no real need of 48 bit LBA support nor of "huge" partitions/volumes, just leave the rest of the disk non-partitioned, the time needed to create the partition and format will be minimal.

jaclaz
 

I don't really know about Advanced Server, but Datacenter Server takes about 2.5GBs. - just to be sure, I have 100GB partition. :D (and now I have 900GBs unpartitioned space...)

Once you ran out of space, I would recommend you to use an third party software, so you can create another partition.

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Well, as a matter of fact, one of the stupidest things (usually done by default by the good MS guys and by all or almost all OEM's) is to have not separate partitions for operating system and data.

What is recommended instead (whenever possible and of course using some grains of salt) is to have the OS on an "own" volume (that should be as small as possible) and have everything else on other volume(s).

The idea here is that any "volume wide" or "filesystem wide" operation (like defrag or chkdsk) will take AGES on large volumes, and this kind of operations are much more likely to be needed on the volume holding the Operating System (as compared to a volume holding mainly data, and particularly "static" data).

Same thing applies to other less common operations (as an example a dd-like image) and SFC/WPF checks.

Depending on the amount of users, also "user profiles" can be moved to another volume.

Using a mountpoint (or softlink if you prefer) solves also issues with the programs that actually *need* a c:\ starting path in most (like 99.99% of cases).

jaclaz


 

Edited by jaclaz
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Well, I've got it working more or less! The only problem is, it doesn't seem to see all 8 cores on my Mac Pro (it will only work in uniprocessor mode). All attempts to run the multiprocessor kernel have failed (it hangs just before the bootscreen). Any ideas on how to fix this? It's probably due to some sort of architectural peculiarity unique to this series of Apple machines.

I should probably document more clearly exactly what I did so it can be repeated?

c

Edited by cc333
Fixing spelling errors...
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6 hours ago, cc333 said:

Well, I've got it working more or less! The only problem is, it doesn't seem to see all 8 cores on my Mac Pro (it will only work in uniprocessor mode). All attempts to run the multiprocessor kernel have failed (it hangs just before the bootscreen). Any ideas on how to fix this? It's probably due to some sort of architectural peculiarity unique to this series of Apple machines.

I should probably document more clearly exactly what I did so it can be repeated?

c

Yes, that would be nice :).

About the multicore, maybe you could see if there is some updated (inside a possibly seemingly unrelated KB) hal/kernel.

Though anyway - if I recall correctly- it will "see" at most a dual core. :unsure: (but that may be limited to "Professional" version).

Anything worth of mention in the logs? Try following:
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/315396

jaclaz
 

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OK, here is what I have so far regarding installation of Windows 2000 Pro on an Early 2008 Mac Pro:

  1. Using nLite and HFSLIP2000 on a Windows XP installation, I slipstreamed all the updates I could find into an untouched RTM Windows 2000 i386 folder.
  2. Then, I copied XP's NTDETECT.COM file into \i386, to allow the disk to boot on the Mac Pro.
  3. I preformatted the target hard drive in Windows so I don't have to wait ages for Windows 2000 setup to do it.
  4. When booting, I punched F5 to select "Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) Computer" so it'll boot. I'm trying to ascertain why the multiprocessor kernel won't boot; see below.
  5. Once Windows is up and running, I install any relevant drivers and BlackWingCat's Extended Core and Extended Kernel to gain full PAE support and to allow some XP apps to run.
  6. Done!

Everything is working well in this configuration, except it seems to only be running off one core of one CPU (which I feel is a big waste of CPU power, since I have two quad-core CPUs installed for a total of 8 cores). No big deal, but little things like this really bother me!

To that end, I've figured out which HAL's belong to which Kernels and added a bunch of boot.ini entries in an attempt to test each configuration, using /KERNEL and /HAL arguments to override the default selections (which are known to boot properly). So far, I've determined that both the ACPI Multiprocessor and ACPI Uniprocessor HAL+Kernel sets get as far as loading "mup.sys" before hanging. I've tried checking the boot logs and system event logs, but it never boots far enough for anything to be written, so the logs (as far as I can tell) are useless.

It seems to me, based on my very limited testing, like it might be hanging on one or more of the initial drivers that get loaded just before the bootscreen shows up. Any ideas what they could be, and possible replacements? It seems the HAL and kernel themselves ARE loading properly, so perhaps they aren't the problem?

Ideas (even speculation!) would be very helpful!

c

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Only a (sorry) not particularly useful comment: mup.sys is usually a red herring, it is the last thing loaded properly BEFORE the one that hangs the system (which you don' t get to know because the system hangs before the related entry is written to the log.). :(

jaclaz


 

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4 hours ago, Windows 2000 said:

Nevertheless, why would you need 8 cores on Windows 2000 ?

For better Speed.

Dude we are now in mordern age p2/p3 are not enouf.

Moreover it is kinda wastage of horse power of a engine

Edited by Dibya
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@Windows2000

@Dibya

9 hours ago, cc333 said:

Everything is working well in this configuration, except it seems to only be running off one core of one CPU (which I feel is a big waste of CPU power, since I have two quad-core CPUs installed for a total of 8 cores). No big deal, but little things like this really bother me!

Out of curiosity, what were the parts in the above that prompted the question and the answer? :dubbio:

jaclaz
 

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Windows 2000: Because I can!

Dibya: I totally agree! It's fine to have a single core (since it's super fast on it's own anyway), but the other 7 are just sitting there doing nothing.

jaclaz: I pretty much figured that mup.sys was a red herring, since replacing it didn't do any good.

c

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Good point. If it's too hard, why bother?

It's just that, since XP is so similar to 2000, and it works perfectly fine with multicore, then why doesn't 2000 work?

I just want to know *why*. If it's too impractical to fix, then I'll let it go.

c

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oh really xp and 2k are same thing.

have you ever broke system files with disassembler and compared 2k with XP, They far different but that word can be applied to old few whistler build of xp.

On 7/14/2016 at 10:21 PM, cc333 said:

Windows 2000: Because I can!

Dibya: I totally agree! It's fine to have a single core (since it's super fast on it's own anyway), but the other 7 are just sitting there doing nothing.

jaclaz: I pretty much figured that mup.sys was a red herring, since replacing it didn't do any good.

c

what about out of 7l of petrol from your car puting out of your 8 ?

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  • 5 months later...

The issue with Win2k's MPS HAL is well documented, and typically happens in the following scenarios:
-Certain BIOSes (such as "insydeH2O")

-Conflicts with the Serial/Parallel port (this was documented by bluebolt and could actually fix your problem, if you have a way to disable those ports)
 

It's unknown why Win2k (and NT4)'s MPS kernels do this, however you gotta understand that they were built for multi processor systems years ago. Perhaps a change in how Windows XP recognizes processors is what fixed the issue for that OS.

Nonetheless, Win2k does end up supporting most MPS/Multi-core systems, provided that they are either desktops (custom built ones in the case of modern units), or laptops prior to 2008 (some 2011-2012 ones support Win2k, but it varies).

Even though it's probably too late to ask, I'd love to see a fix up of the Win2k MPS HAL to repair these issues, and possibly even bring in proper HyperThreading support. It's a long shot and likely not even worth it for this OS, but it would be interesting to see the result.
 

Edited by AnX
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