How I put Windows Phone on a MacBook!
If you have come across this below video recently, you’re guaranteed to think to yourself: “How to do this?”. Well this tutorial will explain it in the most basic terms. And if you know what you’re doing, it’s actually very simple.
What you will need:
A Windows 10 Mobile x86 VHD image (can be downloaded via Visual Studio 2015)
An Intel Mac from 2006-2012 (a Late 2008 MacBook was used for the video)
A spare SATA HDD
A PC that has PowerISO installed
Step 1: Finding the Windows 10 Mobile VHD
Assuming you have Visual Studio 2015 installed with the Windows 10 Mobile SDK, the VHD file should be located in the following directory:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\10\Emulation\Mobile\10.0.14393.0 (or a similar build)\flash.vhd
The flash.vhd file is what we will use as our disk image that we will clone to a SATA HDD.
Step 2: Creating a bootable SATA HDD using the disk image via PowerISO
Using PowerISO on Windows, you will have to create a ‘Bootable USB Drive’ using the selected VHD file. Make sure you click the “List all USB devices” parameter otherwise your connected destination SATA HDD will not show up.
Select the Boot Mode as BIOS (MBR FAT32). You can also try ‘raw write’ but you may run the risk of the HDD not loading
Step 3: Modifying the BCD + Registry so in case of Windows Phone crashing, we can see the BSOD error code.
What I found out when researching Windows Phone is that Microsoft has deliberately disabled the Windows blue screen from actually appearing. This is not the same as the sad face only blue screen which appears only in the Windows Boot Manager. So the way we mitigate this is we modify both the BCD and the Windows Phone OS’s registry to enable it.
The BCD file should be located in the mounted EFIESP partition in the folder ‘boot’. Open a Command Prompt as Administrator and type in the following commands: (replace X:\ with the drive letter of EFIESP)
bcdedit -store X:\boot\bcd -set {globalsettings} mobilegraphics no
bcdedit -store X:\boot\bcd -set {globalsettings} nobootuxprogress no
bcdedit -store X:\boot\bcd -set {globalsettings} nobootuxtext no
Once you’ve done this, open the Registry Editor (Regedit) and load the SYSTEM hive located in the MainOS partition, which should be in MainOS:\Windows\System32\Config\SYSTEM. When Regedit requires you to put in a name for it, we’ll just call it ‘SYSTEM2’.
After loading the SYSTEM hive, go into HKLM\SYSTEM2\ControlSet001\Control\CrashControl and set the ‘AutoReboot’ parameter to ‘0’. And also set the DisplayDisabled parameter to ‘0’ as well.
Afterwards, you can now go into File and click ‘Unload Hive’. Registry editing is done!
Step 4: Booting Windows 10 Mobile on a Mac!
Connect the HDD to the Mac and you should see this as the final result! Note that if the Mac doesn’t enter legacy bios mode (a black screen), use rEFIt or rEFInd to boot into the internal drive.
And there you go! This is Windows 10 Mobile running on a Mac! If you have any questions or feedback, contact me at management@martinnobel.com and I may be able to assist!
