Installing Windows on a Mac should be a piece of cake with Bootcamp, but that rarely is the case. In fact, I would personally say that Boot Camp Assistant is one of the worst apps that comes with OS X and unlike the rest, it doesn’t work seamlessly. A few of its drawbacks:.
Installing Windows on a Boot Camp partition with this method effectively turns your Mac into a straightforward Windows PC, and devotes all of your Mac's processor power and memory - and its. The problem now is about 'portability' of the OS, since with all Mac computer, I can choose which partition boot by pressing Alt + Power (and it will appear my Live partition and the Os one). The problem is in non Mac computer.
It only supports a drive with a single partition. It often throws very obscure error messages with limited detail. It re-downloads 1.6 GB Windows drivers every single time it runs. These are placed under /Library/Application Support/BootCamp/WindowsSupport.dmg and deleted and re-downloaded each time Boot Camp Assistant starts processing. This post did take a lot of work to complie and I did bone my hard drive a few times while trying certain ideas, so please throw out a thanks if it helped you out:) Disclaimer: This guide below contains procedures which can potentially destroy your partitions and data. I accept no responsibility for such loss so please proceed at your own risk.
Update (2016-07-20): I have updated this post with further improvements relating to downloading of Boot Camp drivers and ensuring that a Hybrid MBR is not used (which would cause issues when installing Windows). What You Will Need. An 8 GB or larger USB stick. A copy of the. A valid Windows 10 license. A downloaded copy of Downloading Boot Camp Drivers.
Start Boot Camp Assistant. Select Action / Download Windows Support Software. Choose your Downloads directory, enter your password and then click Save This will be the only step that we will use Boot Camp Assistant for. Diskutil list FAT32 You’ll see your USB drive in the output and it should look something like this: /dev/disk2 (external, physical): #: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER 0: FDiskpartitionscheme.16.0 GB disk2 1: DOSFAT32 FAT32 16.0 GB disk2s1 Once you have kicked off unetbootin, grab a snack while the Windows ISO is copied to the USB stick. This process takes around 15 minutes to complete. Finishing Up When this has completed, you may right click on the USB stick in Finder, select Rename “FAT32” and rename it as you like (I’ll call mine “WINDOWS 10”). Finally, copy the WindowsSupport in your Downloads directory to the Windows 10 USB stick so it’s easy to get to after our installation.
Partitioning Your Drive In Disk Utility, select your internal hard drive on the left panel, and click on Partition. Click the + button and create a new partition of your desired size for your Windows installation and name it as you wish (I’ll call mine “BOOTCAMP”). Ensure that the Format is set to MS-DOS (FAT) and click on Apply.
Ensuring that a Hybrid MBR is not used Huge thanks to Rod’s post from the superuser post titled. Once you add a FAT32 partition with either Boot Camp Assistant or Disk Utility, your disk is converted into a hybrid GPT / MBR disk which is actually not supported by newer versions of Windows. In this step, we revert this additional change made by Disk Utility by switching back to a pure GPT partition table. Dowload the latest version of by browsing to the version, then gdisk-binaries and clicking the file with the.pkg extension (e.g.
Install GPT fdisk by running the installer you downloaded. Open a Terminal and check the state of your MBR. Sudo gdisk /dev/disk0 If your MBR partition is set to hybrid, please continue with step 4, otherwise if it is set to protective, you may skip the rest of this section. Simply type q and hit return to exit GPT fdisk. Type p to view the existing partition table and verify you’re working on the correct disk.
Type x to enter the expert menu. Type n to create a fresh protective MBR. Type w to save your changes and confirm the change when asked. Type q to exit GPT fdisk. Run GPT fdisk to show your disk layout. GPT fdisk (gdisk ) version 1.0.1 Warning: Devices opened with shared lock will not have their partition table automatically reloaded!
Partition table scan: MBR: protective BSD: not present APM: not present GPT: present Found valid GPT with protective MBR; using GPT. Installing Windows Disconnecting All Devices From USB Ports This step is critical as I have had rather serious problems during Windows installation when certain external drives are connected. Unplug everything from your Mac except your keyboard (if wired) and your bootable Windows USB stick (which we prepared earlier).
If your Mac contains multiple physical drives, you will need to disconnect all disks except the one which you intend to install Windows on or you may encounter the following error: Windows could not prepare the computer to boot into the next phase of installation. To install Windows, restart the installation. Booting From the USB Stick Ensure that the USB stick containing the Windows installer is inserted and then restart your Mac while holding down the option (alt) key. You should now be presented with a list of bootable drives. Select the USB drive (usually titled “EFI Boot”) to begin installing Windows. Correcting Your Windows Hard Disk Partition When you are asked Where do you want to install Windows?, select the Windows partition created earlier (which I called “BOOTCAMP”) and click Delete. Next, select the chunk of Unallocated Space and click on New to create a proper Windows NTFS partition.
Note: OS X only supports creation of FAT filesystems, so this is why we need to re-create the partition ourselves during install. Completing the Installation Allow the installer to complete and boot into Windows. Installing Boot Camp Support Software Once Windows is up and running, install the Boot Camp Support software running WindowsSupport/BootCamp/Setup.exe on your USB stick.
Note: The installer takes a little while to show up, so please be patient. You may encounter a known issue whereby the Boot Camp Support Software installer locks up while installing Realtek audio. If this occurs, you will need to open Task Manager and kill the RealtekSetup.exe process. After the installer has completed, answer No when prompted to reboot and install the Realtek drivers manually by running%USERPROFILE% AppData Local Temp RarSFX0 BootCamp Drivers RealTek RealtekSetup.exe. If you can’t find this file, check any other directories starting with RARSFX under%USERPROFILE% AppData Local Temp. Once complete, reboot Windows.
What You Will Need to Configure Windows. The latest version of.
The (see README for a download link) Configuring Windows Mapping Your Mac Keyboard Install and run SharpKeys and then configure the following mappings to correct your Mac keyboard so that it behaves like a regular Windows keyboard: Function: F13 - Special: PrtSc Special: Left Alt = Special: Left Windows Special: Left Windows = Special: Left Alt Special: Right Alt = Special: Right Windows Special: Right Windows = Special: Right Alt Note: for F13, you’ll need to select Press a key and click F13 on your keyboard. Switching to Natural Scrolling If you wish to flip scrolling direction to match that on OS X, run FlipWheel.exe and then click on Flip All.
Enabling Num Lock on Boot Paste the following into a file named Enable NumLock on Boot.reg then import this into the registry to enable NumLock when Windows boots up (it doesn’t by default). Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 HKEYUSERS.DEFAULT Control Panel Keyboard 'InitialKeyboardIndicators'='80000002' Completing Configuration That’s it, give your machine one last reboot and you’ll have a fully working Windows 10 installation. Note: I have found Apple’s Magic Mouse to be extremely unreliable using the Boot Camp drivers from Apple. As such, I recommend purchasing a Logitech (or similar) mouse for use in Windows. I have no trouble plugging the wireless receiver for my Logitech mouse into one of the USB ports of my wired Apple Keyboard and it’s so tiny that you can’t see it at all.
Cleaning up a Windows Installation Removing the Windows Partitions If you decide to remove Windows, you may find that Disk Utility doesn’t allow you to delete the two partitions that have been created by the Windows installer. This happens due to the fact that the first small partition created is of a type called Microsoft Reserved which OS X’s Disk Utility doesn’t support. The safest way to delete these partitions is through the Windows installer. So simply boot from your USB stick as we did before and when you reach the Where do you want to install Windows? Question, you may delete your “BOOTCAMP” partition and the small 16 MB partition of type MSR (Reserved) just above the BOOTCAMP partition. Once done, simply quit the installer by clicking the X in the top right corner of each Window and reboot back into OS X.
Removing the Boot Entry Even though we have removed the Windows partition, a boot entry will still be present when holding down option (alt) during boot. You may remove these items by running the following in your Terminal.
When it comes to the question of how to partition a hard drive Windows 10, there is a free tool that the operating system comes with. This is known as Disk Management which is quite useful and helps users to partition hard disk drives without the need to reboot the computer. After partitioning the hard drive, you will then be able to resize and even delete the partitions as you wish; all this without having to spend any money. Wondering how you can do this? Here is a guide. Opening Disk Management There are two ways to open the Disk Management utility.
Option 1: Point to the bottom left the corner or the Start Button with the mouse and right click. This opens the Quick Access Menu. Choose “Disk Management.”. Disk Management in Windows 10 Once the Disk Management utility is open, you will be met by a window that has the disk information on the right.
The name, size and type of each disk will be indicated. It is important to note that you can only partition disks that are in formats supported by Windows. These are FAT16, NTFS and FAT32. Others will only be seen but cannot be manipulated. Resize and Create new Partition without losing Data Resizing a partition You can be able to resize existing partitions as you wish. However, not all disk partitions can be resized. You can only shrink a partition that has enough free space and extends one that has unallocated space.
Assign a drive letter and Format Partition 5. Choose how you wish for the drive to be formatted. NTFS is the better option since it is the formatting that is the default file system in Windows. It is more secure, fault tolerant and high performance.
In the Disk Management utility page, you will see the formatting process going on which will typically take a few seconds. Formatting a partition You can format any partition in the PC. That is, you can erase everything from the drive to make it clean. To do this: 1. Right click on the partition. Click on “Format”. Confirm that you understand that all files will be lost and click on “Format”.
You should only format partitions after a backup or when you are sure you do not need all the data in the drive. Delete and Extend Partition Deleting a partition There will come a time that you will need to delete a partition. This may be so as to create space to extend another partition or create the partition again with a different file system or size.