Windows 10 on Late 2009 iMac

IT WORKS!!!!!! 😁😁😁

What about sound???? You have find something new????? 😢

Stay away from Automatic Windows Updates. It pushes bad drivers to the Macs causing crashes.

Please also see Windows 10 crashing, but not sure why.

Hi pgleesonuk,

I am trying the same as you did. iMac late 2009 21.5" with Windows 10 (EFI install disk) using bootcamp.

I have partitioned the disk using bootcamp, disable the System Integrity protection in recovery mode (because I am using El Capitan) so I can install Windows 10 in the bootcamp partition. Afterwards, I have installed Windows 10 properly.

Once in Windows 10, I have installed the bootcamp drivers 4.0.4033 and the installation was fine. After restart Windows 10, it is in a rebooting loop, it is not able to load the Windows 10 drivers until the end.

I have repeated the process several times and it doesn't matter if I have installed the bootcamp drivers or not, at some point the system is not able to complete the booting and Windows 10 reboot again. Because of it, I think the problem is related to a driver installed by Windows 10 updates sooner or later, not by the bootcamp drivers. It is always the same issue, the system starts, windows 10 loaded, black screen, reboot.

Did you have the same problem? Have you identify the issue?.

Thanks in advance for your help.

Regards.

Have an iMac (21.5-inch, Mid 2011), partitioned using diskutil in recovery mode, since the bootcamp helper didn't seem to want to help very much. Disabled System integrity protection. I got windows 10 to install, but noticed that it kept crash re-booting before I ever got a chance to install the boot camp drivers. So I figured out that the default wifi driver in 10 seems to be broken.😉 If I don't connect to my home wifi network until after I install the boot camp drivers then it works ok. But now there is a new problem, the windows 10 update broke my working install and I can't seem to get it back without starting the whole process from scratch once again. 😕.

Correct, the main problem are the drivers installed by Windows Update.

Thuber, I will recommend you to restart in Windows 10 safe mode using the installation disk/usb you used during the installation. Once there, you can revert the wrong controller back to the previous driver (using the device manager) or just disable it.

Our systems are different (late 2009 and 2011) although the problem looks the same. The hardware do not recognise the installed drivers which usually make a reference to a wrong hardware address (PCI address I think). By my side, it looks like the installed Windows EFI is not getting on well with my Nvidia 9400M and it doesn't matter which drivers I am installing (Windows Update, Bootcamp 4, 5 or 6 or the Nvidia proprietary), none of them is getting the correct PCI address. As result, the system gets into a continuous reboot loop.

I couldn't find anyone who got the nvidia 9400M working on a iMac 2009 in Windows yet but regarding your problem I read some cases of users installing rEFInd (http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/) and using it as a boot loader, load the specific PCI address for the components their iMacs have.

Pgleesonuk, it is better to use the Windows PowerConsole (c:\windows\system32\WindowsPowerConsole\) to install the bootcamp drivers. Using "start \boocamp\Apple\bootcamp.msi". It will not complain if your system is not allow to install them. I install the bootcamp drivers 4, 5 and 6 in my old iMac 2009. All drivers are working except the nvidia one 😟.

Actually, I found a way to get the updates without it crashing. I went into the OS X and ran parallels to the windows 10 partition. From that instance, I ran the update windows 10 inside parallels, using the virtual hardware kept it from crashing. Once all the updates where complete, I rebooted the machine, selected the windows 10 EFI drive and all was well. I've been using it for a day no problems (fingers crossed), however no sound yet.

"Sound, video and game controllers", I have only "AMD High Defintion Audio Device" (working).

System devices, I have "High Definition Audio Bus" (working) and "High Definition Audio Controller" (not working). Interestingly, It works in parallels, but does not work running in EFI boot.

The 2009/2011 Macs have varying degree of EFI-ness. In both cases, you will end up with devices which may not work properly. For example 2011 Audio only works under a BIOS/MBR installation, not under EFI.

I had some issue with bootcamp so I option booted from the windows 10 DVD (choosing efi boot)

I then had further issues with my partitioned drive.

After using the options within the windows installer to access the command line and using disk part to erase the disk I still failed

NOTE:DISK PARTwill completely erase your drive without warning. this didn't matter to me as I wasn't worried about existing data/OS or about dual booting

After this I was able to install and boot Windows by selecting my internal drive in the list of attached drives, choosing the remove option, then the format option

The result of all this is a 2009 iMac that boots into Windows, but using the default windows display driver (UGH!) and with no audio

After some further struggles I downloaded, from NVidia themselves, a driver that works

That driver was '341.95-notebook-win10-64bit-international' from http://www.geforce.com/drivers which I found by searching as follows

GeForce

GeForce 9M Series (Notebooks)

Windows 10-64-Bit

English (US)

All

I downloaded the most recent driver, installed, continued through the restart and my iMac is now using that driver to display 1920x1080 properly 😀

Now to fix the sound 😟

Hi, Any luck with sound ? I will attempting an Windows 10 install on my 21.5 Inch late 2009 iMac. Thanks

You will need to ensure that the installation type is BIOS, not EFI.

Thanks, any article I can refer to do that ?

On a 2009 iMac, if you use the standard BCA install and use the built-in Optical drive with a physical DVD, the installation type is legacy BIOS. It should install the correct Audio drivers.