NVinNYC

I’ve been messing with the iSight on my brand new MacBook (in white) because it was working at first and then it got really dark (so that you could only see light bulbs in the image). Finally, it stopped working at all with Photo Booth reporting that the camera was in use even after just booting up or logging into a fresh test account.

I figured it must be a software issue because it disappeared when I booted the machine off of my new Mac Pro drive in target disk mode. However a clean install of OS X didn’t change anything even after all the updates were applied.

Somewhat stumped, I did some searching and found this account of the exact same problem (with more technical details). It turns out that because I had installed Boot Camp on my Mac Pro and then booted my Mac Book off of this drive, the iSight firmware had been updated. As such, the Mac Book was unable to communicate with it as it lacked corresponding updated drivers (but the Mac Pro could because it had those drivers). The solution is to extract the iSight drivers from the Boot Camp 1.1 installer and add them to the Mac Book (Boot Camp installation is not needed, but would work too). I imagine this will only be an issue until Apple releases 10.4.8 which bundles the updated drivers, but I thought it was an interesting problem worth discussing. However, this could remain an issue in the future for a computer that hasn’t been updated to 10.4.8 or had Boot Camp 1.1 installed.

The moral of the story is: be careful mixing machines with Boot Camp updates and those without.