The MacBook has no eject button under Vista. The eject key doesn’t work either. To eject CD-ROM, you need to use Windows Explorer. Once you have Windows Explorer opened up, you need to right click on the optical drive and select “eject” assuming you have an external mouse. If not, you will need to run a 3rd party utility like applemouse.exe to simulate the right mouse click. Anyway, there are multiple steps involved just to eject CD-ROM.

I found a VBscript to eject CD-ROM. When I tried the script on my MacBook, it didn’t work. After experimenting a bit, I got the code to work. Here is the modified version.

Const CDROM = 4
For Each d in CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject").Drives
  If d.DriveType = CDROM Then
    Eject d.DriveLetter & ":\"
  End If
Next

Sub Eject(sDriveLetter)
  Dim ssfDrives
  Dim oShell
  ssfDrives = 17
  CreateObject("Shell.Application")_
    .Namespace(ssfDrives).ParseName(sDriveLetter).InvokeVerb("Eject")
End Sub

I created a shortcut to this script on the Quick Launch bar. Now, I can eject CD-ROM with just one mouse click. Also, remember that the items on the Quick Launch bar have keyboard shortcuts assigned to them. The keyboard shortcut is Windows key + Number where the number represents the order of the item on the Quick Launch bar. For example, the script to eject CD-ROM is the 7th item on the Quick Launch bar. I can use Windows key + 7 to invoke the script to eject the CD-ROM.

I just upgraded my MacBook from Vista Business to Vista Ultimate. After the upgrade, the audio device is not working any more. I tried to uninstall the audio device and re-install it several times and it didn’t work. I then try to google for solution, and what do you know, I found the solution in my own blog!

A reader left a comment in my early post about Vista RC1 on MacBook. Here is what he said.

For those of you having issues with MacBook sound on Vista after an upgrade from an earlier version of Vista (and maybe XP – not sure), there is a bug with the Sigmatel driver installation package that affects the upgrade scenario. It will look like the install worked, but you’ll get the error “No Audio Output Device Installed” as a tooltip from the system tray speaker icon, and in the Control Panel sound settings dialog. You can get around this by going to Device Manager, *uninstalling* the Sigmatel audio that appears under sound devices (choose to remove the software too, this won’t remove the installer, just the copied driver), and running the installer’s setup.exe (as Administrator).

A little background before I go into the details of this guide. If you install Vista Beta 2 on a MacBook using BootCamp Assistant, you cannot set the default startup disk at ease. You can only set Mac OS X as the default startup disk using the Startup Disk tool in System Preferences. You cannot set the Vista Beta 2 as the startup disk once you set the MacBook’s default startup disk as Mac OS X.

nvram is a command line utility to manage firmware NVRAM varialbles. Even though MacBook uses EFI instead of OpenFirmware, it still uses NVRAM to store boot information. After some experiments, I was able to use nvram to set startup disk to either Mac OS X partition or Vista Beta 2 partition. The following steps are for a dual boot machine whose startup disk is Vista Beta 2.

1. Boot the machine to Mac OS X.
2. Open up Terminal application and type in

   sudo bash

   to get root access.

3. In the Terminal window, type in the following to save the Vista boot information to the windows.nvram file.

   nvram -p > windows.nvram

4. Open the Startup Disk tool in System Preferences and set the startup disk to Mac OS X.
5. Reboot the machine to Mac OS X.
6. Repeat step 2.
7. In the Terminal window, type in the following to save the Mac OS X boot information to the mac.nvram file.

   nvram -p > mac.nvram

Now you have two NVRAM files: windows.nvram and mac.nvram. If you want to set the default startup disk, just do the steps 1 ~ 2 and the following:

• Set startup disk to Vista Beta 2

  nvram -f windows.nvram

• Set startup disk to Mac OS X

  nvram -f mac.nvram

When you use the nvram command with -f switch, you might get an error message like this:

nvram: Error (-1) setting variable - 'efi-boot-device-data'

It’s OK. The system boots to the OS as we specified regardless the error.

UPDATE: [The trick detailed below only works if your default startup disk is set to Mac OS X. The boot.efi file only let you reboot the machine, it DOES NOT boot the system to Mac OS X partition. My MacBook was set to boot to OS X by default when I tried it, therefore I got the false sense that by booting the boot.efi, I actually boot the machine to OS X. I am sorry for the misinformation. I'll research more about how to actually use Vista's boot manager to boot OS X. What I really wanted to achieve is to have a boot manager to dual boot Vista and OS X at the startup without holding the Option key, and there is a perfect program for that. It's called rEFIt.]

Windows Vista comes with a new boot manager, that is very flexible. I thought it would be nice if I could use that to specify an entry for Mac OS X. However, the technology is new and I cannot find many documentations about it. The FAQ in Microsoft’s web site does not tell you how to create a boot loader for Mac OS X. It only tells you how to create a boot loader for legacy systems like Windows XP.

I then found out that people are using a chain0 file with Vista’s boot manager to dual boot OS X and Vista for the OSx86 project. I tried that, but it did not work. The problem is that the chain0 file is not for booting Mac OS X on MacBook. What I really need is already on my MacBook. It’s called boot.efi and it’s under /usr/standalone/i386/ . The file is hidden from Finder. You will need to use Terminal application to copy it. Here are the steps.

1. Boot to Mac OS X. Open Terminal application and type in the following to copy boot.efi to the Desktop.

   cp /usr/standalone/i386/boot.efi ~/Desktop/

2. Copy the boot.efi file to a USB key.
3. Boot to Vista and copy the boot.efi file from the USB key to C:\
4. Now open Command Prompt as administrator. If you don’t know how to do this, please follow the steps 1~3 in this post.
5. We need to determine if you have a legacy boot loader in your system. Type in the command in the Command Prompt window.

   bcdedit /enum all | find "{ntldr}"

   If this command returns

   identifier              {ntldr}

   , that means you already have a legacy boot loader in your system. Follow step 6 and skip step 7. If the command didn’t return anything, skip step 6 and follow step 7.

6. Type in the following to copy the legacy boot loader.

   bcdedit /copy {ntldr} /d "Mac OS X"
   bcdedit /set {YOUR-GUID-HERE} device boot
   bcdedit /set {YOUR-GUID-HERE} path \\boot.efi
   bcdedit /displayorder {YOUR-GUID-HERE} /addlast

   Note that you need to replace YOUR-GUID-HERE with the actual GUID returned by the first command. To illustrate this, the following are the actual commands and responses.

   C:>bcdedit /copy {ntldr} /d "Mac OS X"
   The entry was successfully copied to {bcfa924e-07e0-11db-9d86-accf6fd346a1}. 
   
   C:>bcdedit /set {bcfa924e-07e0-11db-9d86-accf6fd346a1} device boot
   The operation completed successfully. 
   
   C:>bcdedit /set {bcfa924e-07e0-11db-9d86-accf6fd346a1} path \\boot.efi
   The operation completed successfully. 
   
   C:>bcdedit /displayorder  {bcfa924e-07e0-11db-9d86-accf6fd346a1} /addlast
   The operation completed successfully.

7. Type in the following to create a new legacy boot loader.

   bcdedit /create {ntldr} /d "Mac OS X"
   bcdedit /set {ntldr} device boot
   bcdedit /set {ntldr} path \\boot.efi
   bcdedit /displayorder {ntldr} /addlast

Now you can see there is an entry for “Mac OS X” whenever you boot to Vista, select that and you can boot to Mac OS X.

After I made my MacBook dual boot with Vista, I found that the files I save under OS X partition cannot be accessed under Vista. One solution is to install MacDrive under Vista, but it’s not free. It would be nice if I can create a FAT32 partition so that both OS X and Vista has read/write access to it. One new feature of Vista is shrink or extend volume(partition) on the fly. I tried to use that feature to create a FAT32 partition and it works flawlessly. Here is what I did.

1. Click on Start button. Right click on Computer and select Manage to bring up Computer Management.
2. In Computer Management console, click on Disk Management to select it.
   
   
3. Right click on Volume (C:) and select Shrink Volume….
   
4. Enter the amount you need. In this dialog, I entered 5120 MB.
   
5. After a couple of minutes, you can see that a new unallocated partition is created at the end of the drive.
   
6. Right click on this partition and select New Simple Volume… . Follow New Simple Volume Wizard to format this partition as FAT32.
   
7. Wait for a few minutes and you are done.