How do I install a 64-bit Windows 7 on a Macbook Pro without Boot Camp?
If I were you, I won't bother installing windows without boot camp, since it is painfully unnecessary if you do so.
You'll be losing something like one hour and 10GB of harddisk space if you install (restore) OSX and install bootcamp, but you'll save lots of time since bootcamp will do the EFI booting configurating, partitions creating and shrinking, providing mac hardware drivers etc.
This is for Vista, but the same rules should apply to 7.
http://derekhat.com/install-vista-on-a-macbook-without-bootcamp/
I did it following the Vista instructions that Joseph posted above. It will work, but here are a few things I wish someone would have told me:
the big gotcha: no xp mode
- if you want to use "xp mode" with windows 7, you have to enable your hardware virtualization in the bios. But macs don't have "bioses" so you'll have no way to do this after you install. Forum rumor has it that if you boot first to osx and then reboot into windows 7 that osx will start it for you and then you can use xp mode. of course, you need bootcamp to be able to boot both of these (maybe you could install osx to another hd or something).
You can use VMLight instead, but I installed itunes on that and it just crashed without running. Had similar experiences with Adobe on parrallels in OSx.
there's some general issues with booting macs that most users probably know already, but I did not:
do the disk util thing the way the vista instructions describe.
when you reboot with your windows 7 cd, it will do some initial instally-things and then reboot your computer. You have to hold down the "alt" key when it's rebooting and then select the hard drive to boot from, otherwise you will be stuck with a white/grey screen.
when you are done with the install, reboot and hold down "alt" and then control-click the windows-7 drive to make it the default boot volume and you don't have to hold "alt" down anymore on restart.
As others have said, it's probably best to just use bootcamp and set windows as the default. Unless you're putting everything on one big raid volume and booting straight from that, osx isn't really hurting anything except a few megs off your boot volume, but that's not typically a problem.
(I didn't install any drivers from the disk and didn't have any problems)