8/21/2023 0 Comments Boot camp support windows 7At this point, things start getting ugly: Unfortunately Microsoft wasn't as thorough with their installer design as Debian is and the Mac wouldn't boot it. I have an ISO, I can just clone it to the flash drive with dd and tell the Mac to boot from it, right? That worked just fine with a Debian ISO on this exact same machine. Installing Windows 7 from a flash driveĮverything is put back together and it's time to install Windows. I wouldn't fault anyone for getting a third party to do this sort of maintenance for them. But damn, this was one of the trickiest things I've had to do with electronics and it had me on edge the whole time. Apple really is the master of hardware design. This machine is a work of art, inside and out. Instead, after sweating bullets just getting the monitor off and disassembled, I decided to just put the SSD in the space of the main drive bay and just sort of let it dangle there because I don't have any sort of tray or insert. And it only gets weirder from there: the LCD is attached with several tiny cords, and in order to get to the spare drive bay (they have space for a spinning disk drive and a modern SSD) you have to disassemble nearly everything, as the spare drive bay is buried underneath the CD drive and against the back of the case. Once the front plastic is off you can start with unscrewing the LCD which is sitting on top of everything. Online videos recommended using suction cups like you'd do with a piece of sheet glass but I was able to get it with fingernails, shims and some patience. So to start any sort of internal repair you have to start with popping this plastic off without snapping it. The front of the iMac is actually a big slab of glass/plastic held in place with strong magnets. It looks stunning now and was revolutionary when it first came out. This is one of those all-in-one iMacs where they've got the entire PC behind the LCD. I grabbed a $60 internal SSD from a big box store and went to work. I think the machine was originally disused because the disk was just so slow, making the machine a chore to use. To make the machine usable I wanted to replace the old spinning disk with a modern but cheap SSD. Stay tuned, maybe I'll have the time to write my replacement for cloud backup some day. s3ql's been an OK tool but its maintainership has not been great and it's had a few of these unfortunate bugs, enough to give me pause and question whether I should be using it for backups. At any rate my volume is huge and it'll take forever to download and validate all these blobs so I have to spin up a one-off VM in the cloud just to do this fsck stuff and it still costs me like $40+ and a few days of VM time to do the entire fsck. I am not positive why they couldn't just get the size from the GCS metadata but it may have been related to the on-the-fly compression they do to your blobs. Furthermore, that tool worked by fetching the entire GCS blob to just to verify its size. However, if you read the patch notes, s3ql had some serious sounding data corruption bugs and I needed to fsck the backup volume and also run a special data verification tool related to the data corruption issue. It was easy to get the iMac to boot off of a Debian live USB, install s3ql and its dependencies on that, and do rsync to backup the whole drive. I use s3ql and Google Cloud Storage for my cloud backups and wanted to do a complete backup of this drive. The old hard drive had a still working but slow spinning disk drive full of personal documents and photos from my family. So maybe I can throw Windows 7 on it, have a stable Windows machine around for once, and have an actual gaming PC? I went for it. At the same time, though, I don't play games released in the past decade. I thought it might make a good web browsing appliance but I didn't realistically see it getting much use in this household. The iMac was released in 2011 with a Sandy Bridge i5, a big, beautiful monitor, 12 GB of RAM or so, and an integrated, laptop-grade Radeon 6750M graphics card. I've had this iMac 12,1 sitting around for a few years unused.
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