My friend samis2613 got a 2010 Mac Mini recently, with it being his first old computer he has owned in a while. Naturally, we wanted to create a crazy multi-boot of old Windows versions (and Mac OS) on there that we couldn’t otherwise run natively. However, this came with a few caveats...

One of the first things we discovered was that the included CD/DVD “SuperDrive” did not accept discs. Whenever we tried to insert one, the drive’s mechanism to pull it in did nothing no matter how we shoved the disc in. Because of this, we decided we would have to boot from USB for these installs.

Our first objective was getting classic Mac OS X on the machine; we chose 10.6 Snow Leopard--(what I believe is) the prime of Mac OS (maybe next to 10.4 Tiger)--and got an ISO of it to put on to a USB. After a bit of research, we found the best way to put this install media on a USB was using balenaEtcher. The process of flashing the install media was quite fast, and it booted just fine on the Mac Mini. From there, we went through the usual, simple installation process and ended with a fresh, proper Snow Leopard install.

Now is where things get mischievous. We popped open Disk Utility and were greeted with a bizarre-looking partition scheme and errors when resizing. Well, it turned out this was because we didn’t completely erase the disk before installing, instead leaving a past partition on there that Mac OS didn’t really like. As a quick fix, we just erased the entire disk from Disk Utility in the install media and reinstalled Snow Leopard, but this might also be fixable by rearranging partition orders with iPartition (which we will get into later...). After this, we were finally able to set up our four planned partitions on our 250 GB storage drive--Mac OS 10.6 (70 GB), Windows 7 (70 GB), Windows Vista (70 GB), and Windows XP (30 GB).

So, we then installed version 1.0.0 of the gdisk partitioning tool to set up our hybrid MBR. We followed the guide at https://www.rodsbooks.com/gdisk/hybrid.html to set it up carefully, popping the XP, Vista, and 7 partitions into the MBR, setting the usual 07 MBR hex code for NTFS on each, marking only the 7 partition as boot, and making sure the EFI partition was placed first in the disk. After that, we thought we were ready to install, but as soon as we tried to boot any legacy install media (using rEFInd on another USB since Macs don’t like booting legacy USBs), we were greeted by an endlessly-blinking cursor. After a while, we figured out that this issue seemed to somehow have been caused by using gdisk to create the initial hybrid MBR instead of the Boot Camp Assistant, so we wiped out our Windows partitions using Disk Utility and made the disk one big Mac OS partition again. Then, we were able to go through the Boot Camp Assistant and let it just make a 30 GB XP partition, and booting install media finally worked!

Next, we were finally ready to get Windows XP installed. Since XP is weird with installation USBs, we decided to put a Windows 7-based preinstallation environment (AKA the PowerISO rescue media) on a USB along with the I386 folder from the original XP install media. We booted up the PE, opened up the Command Prompt, navigated to the I386 folder on the USB, launched WINNT32.EXE with parameters /syspart:C: /tempdrive:C: /makelocalsource to ensure the boot files would be copied to the XP partition (otherwise they would be copied to the USB and ensue further confusion), and began the installation. We then booted the XP installation from our internal drive... and our keyboard input didn’t work. We figured out it was a quirk of the keyboard samis was using and that we would need to strategically disconnect and reconnect it right after initially booting the installation from its boot entry. But, then we encountered another issue... “Disk error” appeared whenever we tried to boot the next stage of installation. We figured out thanks to this Apple support page that this was due to a quirk in the FAT32 to NTFS upgrade we did in the XP setup. We had to redo the XP setup but with the launch parameters setting the boot files to be copied to the USB drive instead so that the partition we planned to install on could be formatted properly. We formatted the partition with an NTFS quick format during the XP setup, and after constantly redirecting to the USB drive as the source for the installation files in I386 during the next stage of setup, we had a functional installation of Windows XP. We installed the Boot Camp drivers from the Snow Leopard install media and now had drivers fully working, too.

However, we ran into an issue getting Vista and 7 on the machine: rEFInd refused to boot from USB now that we had a higher-priority internal drive to boot from. This ended up basically being a death sentence to us installing from USB since the 64-bit setups for Vista and 7 would not run on our 32-bit XP either. So, we desperately looked for a way to fix this SuperDrive. A replacement was out of the books as it basically involved disassembling the entire Mac Mini. Forcing an eject always did nothing no matter how many times we did it. In a last-ditch effort to fix the dang drive, we followed the directions in the replies of https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5031507?sortBy=rank, shoving a spare card into and around the SuperDrive to clean it out and spring it back into place. After doing this for a while and shoving a disc into the drive with a little more force than usual, it finally sucked in and read discs. We recreated a 70 GB partition for Vista and then used gdisk to recreate the hybrid MBR, this time only adding Vista and XP (XP as boot) as MBR partitions. We were ready to insert our Windows Vista installation disc and get installing.

From there, setting up Vista was a much simpler process. We went through the installation as usual, booting from the installation disc, directing the install to the Vista partition, and installing the Snow Leopard Boot Camp drivers. After this, we created the 70 GB Windows 7 partition and added it to the hybrid MBR using gdisk, similarly to Vista and XP. However, when we went back to try to boot XP again, we were greeted to a 0x7B (INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE) Blue Screen of Death. After a lot of research and brainstorming, we figured out XP--and only XP--does not like being in the fourth partition of a hybrid MBR. We decided to use the Mac OS partitioning tool iPartition to fix things up. We used iPartition’s included tool to create a boot DVD, booted into it, and opened up the partition map. From there, we could drag around the partition pointers so that XP would be read as the second partition (next to the EFI partition, which was of course important to be first in order to boot at all). However, it seems this sort of arrangement we have created--having a discrepancy between physical partition locations and pointers to those partitions--is what caused the initial weird partition display and resizing errors in Disk Utility, but other tools read it just fine, so we left it as-is (mainly because iPartition didn’t want to move the actual location of the XP partition for some reason). After doing that and adjusting XP’s boot.ini to correspond to its relocated partition pointer, XP (and Vista) booted just fine. We were ready to install Windows 7 and complete our quad-boot.

Of course, the installation for Windows 7 was pretty much the same as Vista. After installing 7 and the Snow Leopard Boot Camp drivers, we enjoyed some moments playing Purble Place and performing our license activations over the phone in a Skype group call with the activation agent. Finally, we have successfully completed this wild journey of a hybrid MBR Mac Mini quad-boot.

Continuing the topic of obscure OS-tan media, there is quite a bit of unknown official pieces of Microsoft OS-tan games, manga, and more that is now lost. This post, of course, will not be discussing unofficial/doujin OS-tan lost media as it is way too wide of a collection (However, there may be a post about some highlights of favorite overall Japanese unofficial/doujin lost media someday).

First of all, let's cover the lost Nanami Madobe game: Nanami Madobe's Heart Crisis (窓辺ななみ ハート クライシス). 

The game was a "card choice" game where the player would have to choose the correct attack cards to deal with various computerized enemies. Apparently, there was also a card that showed Nanami's parents in the game; we're missing out on some important lore. This information is based off of simple descriptions of the game from Japanese player HAGER and player Crystalyn from Anime News Network since there are sadly no gameplay images or videos online showing it off. Luckily, we do at least have images of enemy-transition screens and wallpapers awarded for beating the game thanks to Chinese player CCSX.

Next up is the OS-tan manga: Attack on Madobe Family / Comiket Raid (進撃の窓辺ファミリーコミケ急襲作戦).

(Image courtesy of Suruga-ya)

This was a manga that Toshiya Takahashi illustrated and Microsoft exclusively sold at Comiket 87 along with many other OS-tan items, including special OS-tan DSP releases of Windows 8, badges, Touch Mice, bags, and more. The manga revolves around the Madobes' experiences in Comiket, with Nanami and Claudia showing Yuu and Ai around and introducing them to the event. Of course, this summary comes from Shimogawa's review as the full manga is lost.

Finally is the (partially) lost Internet-Explorer-tan OneDrive, including downloadables such as a specially-themed Internet Explorer installer (which was also lost until I found a download), various images of the character at conventions, fan-made MMD models, and custom Windows sound schemes. A lot of the goodies are present in https://archive.org/details/inori-aizawa-onedrive and https://archive.org/details/inori-aizawa-ie11-win7-setup-1.0, but some downloadables, such as the aforementioned convention images, are not included and currently lost to time.

Missing downloadables info courtesy of Jake Smith in a comment on the latest post of https://www.facebook.com/InternetExplorerTan (fan account; official account was moved to https://www.facebook.com/InoriAizawaFans which is now also a dead link :()

Overall, official OS-tan media is quite a bit more extensive than I initially thought, with some such as these being quite obscure. If I receive any updates on these pieces, I'll be sure to update this post, and if I find some more notable entries... maybe make another blog post, like what happened with the Touhou and Seihou trials. O_o