Hi!
It works just fine on a MacBook Air. I did this to install Boot Camp
several months ago, and all I needed was the regular earpods (though it
probably doesn't matter as long as you plug something into the 3.5MM
jack.) I didn't have speech when I did not use the EarPods, although
some people have gotten USB audio to work with headsets.
I just tried this again to see if it still works on my Mid2012 MacBook
Air 11 inch, and it works fine. Keyboard and mouse included, because it
uses generic drivers. Obviously that means FN doesn't work, at least not
on mine, but it works fine otherwise.
Nicolai
On 12/2/2015 7:43 AM, Paul Erkens wrote:
Hi Paul,
That’s a problem. It’s quite a story, but I’ll tell you all I know. I
have bootcamp installed and it went successfully on my mac mini late
2012. However, on a macbook air from a friend from 2013, it did not
work at all. Yes you can boot Bryan’s DVD and you will get to a
windows desktop soon where NVDA is running indeed, but you have no
drivers, so that interaction with the system is impossible. There is
no keyboard driver inside Bryan’s DVD, that supports your macbook air
keyboard. Likewise, there is no compatible mouse driver so you cannot
use the mouse. Likewise, the talking DVD does not have the macbook air
sound driver as far as I’m aware, so you won’t hear anything from NVDA
at all. I tried plugging in a USB keyboard, a USB mouse and a USB
sound system, but with no luck. If the talking windows installer DVD
can be used on a macbook air at all, I hope we will hear how to work
that thing, for on other systems, it is very usable and useful. What
follows is my experience on my mac mini late 2012. If that’s not what
you think can help you, by all means skip the rest.
You will go through these steps:
1. Get and burn Bryan’s dvd.
2. Go through the bootcamp assistant and at the reboot, turn off your mac.
3. Install windows using Bryan’s DVD.
4. Finish the rest of the installation, either with a sighted person
or using fusion.
Regarding step 1: Bryan’s DVD.
I would advise you to use the large Bryan archive, as that contains a
working installer for an entire windows 7 system. Once you have the
iso image, have a capable program burn its contents on to a dvd. Then
leave that DVD for a while.
Regarding step 2: running bootcamp assistant.
Before going ahead, first have a USB flash drive, stick or key ready,
and format it as fat32.
From the utilities folder on your mac, run the bootcamp assistant. It
will let you perform these 3 tasks, and I would advise you to let it
do all of them.
A. Unfortunately, it will ask for a USB drive or USB stick, onto which
bootcamp assistant will then copy the windows installation files. Just
to satisfy the bootcamp assistand on the mac, you will have to let it
do this, or you won’t get your bootcamp partition created afterwards.
You won’t need this windows installer because we are going to use
Bryan’s, but bootcamp wants you to go through this. Bootcamp assistant
wants an iso file, or a physical DVD with an official windows
installer, supposedly to proove that you indeed own one. It reads
windows off of your dvd or iso file, and transfers those files over to
the USB flash drive, which again, you don’t really need.
b. Windows does not know how to listen to your keyboard on your mac,
nor how to listen to the mouse, or how to send sound out through your
mac speakers. For all kinds of hardware, windows drivers are required.
Once you run the bootcamp assistant, you can enable a checkbox that
lets it download the specific set of drivers for your very mac. Just
check that box and let it do that, because once done, you will have a
windows installation USB flash drive, that also has a directory on it
for the bootcamp, i.e. mac hardware in windows drivers. And you need
those after installing windows. You will also need nvda, so download
that and put it on the USB flash drive for later. I would rename the
official NVDA installer to NVDA.exe.
c. Next, bootcamp installer will ask you how much space to allocate to
windows on your hard drive. That space is taken away from OS 10. There
is a slider that lets you devide your disk, and after each nudge of
the slider, you move off of it, to read the labels telling you how
much space is now set aside for windows.
Then, the bootcamp assistand utility will reboot your mac. Normally,
a sighted person would then continue the installation from the USB
key, and then, after windows is installed, install the bootcamp
drivers, to enable all mac hardware functions inside windows. However,
for us that is a different matter. What I do when the reboot comes, is
turn off the mac entirely, and then boot from Bryan’s DVD.
If you have not seen Bryan’s dvd in action, here’s what it does. After
you boot it, you will land on the windows 7 desktop. But this is a
very minimal system. What’s great about it, is that NVDA is already
running. You can do all sorts of things like inserting a USB drive,
running programs from it etc. Besides, you will find the windows 7
installer right away through the computer icon, in xp that was my
computer, so from there it’s easy, because you now have speech during
the windows installation. But on a mac, it’s not that easy.
On my mac mini where all went fine after all, I had no sound
initially, after I started from Bryan’s DVD. So, I plugged in a pair
of usb speakers and booted the dvd again. This time, still no sound.
The USB external speakers are functioning, but with a volume of zero.
So I attached my braille display, an Alva bc 640, which did not work
either, initially.
I then used NVDA plus f4 and enter, to stop NVDA. Then relaunch it.
The NVDA key is your capslock key, so hit capslock plus f4. You won’t
hear anything, but NVDA is asking whether to stop or not, and you have
okay which is default, and cancel. Therefore, you hit enter and NVDA
quits. To relaunch, hit windows key plus m, m as in Mike, to go to the
desktop, then type nv to bring the cursor to the NVDA icon, and hit
enter there. By the way, to the left of your spacebar you now have the
windows key, and the one to the left of that is now your windows alt
key. So now, NVDA is running again.
If the driver for your braille display happens to be part of NVDA,
then you’re in luck. I have a bc 640 from Alva, and Alva is the first
braille display in nVDA’s list. So, after closing and relaunching
NVDA, I opened NVDA’s preferences using the NVDA key plus n, n as in
november. On a virtual windows machine inside fusion, I had previously
rehursed the keystroke sequence to open NVDA’s braille preferences and
select the display. To summarize, after hitting NVDA plus n, you have
to go down and right a few times so you land on preferences, then
right to open preferences, then 3 down to braille, then enter, and
then I landed on the list of displays. Alva was the first at the top,
so I hit up arrow a hundred times, exageration is a hobby sometimes,
and then, knowing the cursor is on Alva, I hit enter to run the Okay
button in the dialog. Immediately, I then had braille.
Besides, because of the NVDA reinitialization,the USB speaker system
did work, but with a volume of 0 as I said. I think that’s a bug
somewhere. Thanks to my braille display, I could then go to the system
tray and then crank up the windows volume there, and then I had speech
from NVDA.
Regarding step 3: installing windows itself.
Basically, then you go into computer, where you see the windows drive
list, you select the file system that contains the windows
installation tool that is visible on Bryan’s DVD, and there you run
it. Either 64 or 32-bit are on Bryan’s DVD. You can read all windows
that the installer throws at you, until the reboot, where new problems
arrive.
One interesting thing I found, was that while choosing the drive to
install windows on to, I saw a number of partitions I had no idea they
existed on my system. There are EFI partitions, and other unknowns.
However, if you label the newly created bootcamp partition beforehand,
it’s easy to find it. Then, you just run through the installation process.
A note on the bootcamp partition. The bootcamp utility formats it as
fat32. If you want it to be NTFS from the beginning, just reformat the
bootcamp partition from one of the first windows installer dialogs.
Quick format as NTFS does it. As I said, then follow the instructions
until the reboot.
After the reboot though, the initial windows files will have been
placed on your bootcamp partition, but you no longer have speech from
NVDA because it’s no longer running. The mac will take its time and
reboot one or 2 times later on, so just wait through that. However,
the second part of the windows installation still requires
interactivity from the user, which we cannot give it.
So, What I did, was run VmWare Fusion, import the bootcamp partition,
and then finished the installation from there. In bootcamp, you can
have speech because fusion has sound drivers for your mac.
Alternitively, you will probably need sighted assistance for this last
bit, but it’s only a few screens. You simply hit next all the time,
and then you adjust your time zone, windows updates, keyboard layout
etc etc, later on. You do have to create your user account though, so
you will want a sighted person or a screen reader inside fusion for
this stage.
Once windows is installed, you again will have USB sound, but no NVDA
yet. Insert your USB flash drive, hit windows key plus r to open the
run dialog and type:
e:nvda and hit enter. Needless to say that you may have to try
different drive letters, because you don’t exactly know to which
letter your flash drive will be assigned. Follow NVDA’s prompts to get
it installed.
Lastly, install your bootcamp drivers from your USB flash drive and
then do all your windows updates.
There is a program called winclone, that I bought a license for. It
lets you backup your entire bootcamp partition from within mac OS10,
into 1 single file on OS10. There are other tools that can do the same
thing, but I forgot their names. It’s a good idea to have a backup of
your clean bootcamp partition with all updates already on it, in case
you screw it up.
You can also use snapshot.exe for windows backup and restore on
bootcamp. That’s a tiny program for windows that you get from
www.drivesnapshot.de <http://www.drivesnapshot.de>. You run it from
windows, it asks which drive to backup, and where to, for example you
give it e:\bootcamp.sna. The .sna extension is for snapshots of entire
drives, and these files are created by this snapshot.exe program. So
you have a number of options to backup your new bootcamp. If things do
go wrong, you have winclone from the mac side, or boot from BRyan’s
DVD and then use snapshot.exe to restore your backup .sna file back to
its original bootcamp partition.
Hope that helps.
Kind regards,
Paul, from Holland.
On 18 Nov 2015, at 21:53, Paul Sandoval <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
i'm trying to install Windows 7 via Boot Camp.
I'm also attempting to use the talking windows installer.
If someone has experience using this installer, I could really use
some assistance.
I've listened to a podcast on Apple this, but I do not know what I'm
missing.
I'm using a MacBook air mid 2013.
Thanks for any help you can give me.
Sent from Pablo's iPhone
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