I know it sounds silly to want to run XP on hardware like this, but the intent was to be able to run some of my older games on this machine, in addition to supporting some of my other Macs. EveryMac notes that the minimum version of Windows supported on this particular model is XP SP2. I guess that might not be correct, but until I get confirmation I’ll keep trying.
Online sources suggested using my macOS install disc while Windows is running to install it, but that’s not how I installed El Capitan, I downloaded it directly from the Apple website and used one of my other El Capitan compatible Macs to prepare a bootable disk.
Note to others – As I have discovered, Apple Silicon Macs cannot prepare bootable drives with older versions of macOS by any means I know of, because the Mac OS X installer package will not work on an M-series chip ( M1, M2), and the application file will not be extracted. To be clear, in order to create a Mac OS X/macOS bootable USB, you need to open the .dmg file and run the package file inside, which will then create an Install Mac OS X/macOS app in your folder. Apps. This application is what is needed to restore to a USB drive, but when running the package file on an Apple Silicon Mac, it refuses to extract the application file because the computer cannot run it .
I also looked everywhere for specific support files, but the only one I found was specifically for Windows 7 on this system, and using Windows 7 instead of XP might throw yet another wrench in things. The last thing I tried was downloading the support files when booting macOS El Capitan and then rebooting into XP. Well, trying to run one of those installers basically caused my XP install to fail and it couldn’t reboot, so now I’m reinstalling XP on the partition I created.
Also, I download the complete 31GB Snappy driver installation file to another flash drive. It continues, so I can’t really say how successful (or unsuccessful) it was. Other than that, I’m out of ideas and would like some help on the subject.
I know it sounds silly to want to run XP on hardware like this, but the intent was to be able to run some of my older games on this machine, in addition to supporting some of my other Macs. EveryMac notes that the minimum version of Windows supported on this particular model is XP SP2. I guess that might not be correct, but until I get confirmation I’ll keep trying.
Online sources suggested using my macOS install disc while Windows is running to install it, but that’s not how I installed El Capitan, I downloaded it directly from the Apple website and used one of my other El Capitan compatible Macs to prepare a bootable disk.
Note to others – As I have discovered, Apple Silicon Macs cannot prepare bootable drives with older versions of macOS by any means I know of, because the Mac OS X installer package will not work on an M-series chip ( M1, M2), and the application file will not be extracted. To be clear, in order to create a Mac OS X/macOS bootable USB, you need to open the .dmg file and run the package file inside, which will then create an Install Mac OS X/macOS app in your folder. Apps. This application is what is needed to restore to a USB drive, but when running the package file on an Apple Silicon Mac, it refuses to extract the application file because the computer cannot run it .
I also looked everywhere for specific support files, but the only one I found was specifically for Windows 7 on this system, and using Windows 7 instead of XP might throw yet another wrench in things. The last thing I tried was downloading the support files when booting macOS El Capitan and then rebooting into XP. Well, trying to run one of those installers basically caused my XP install to fail and it couldn’t reboot, so now I’m reinstalling XP on the partition I created.
Also, I download the complete 31GB Snappy driver installation file to another flash drive. It continues, so I can’t really say how successful (or unsuccessful) it was. Other than that, I’m out of ideas and would like some help on the subject.