Novelty Condom
Level 1
(1 points)
Q: Retina 5K - AMD Boot Camp Driver failure
I would like to begin a discussion of the Boot Camp Drivers for the AMD video card in the stock Retina 5K iMac. There is a thread that demonstrates what appears to be a successful install of the drivers, and a thread that demonstrates a non-successful install.
A non-sucessful install looks like this:
The drivers tab indicates that driver version 14.200.1002.1002 is installed.
This is the stock Boot camp driver install. The latest beta Catalyst drivers from the AMD website will also return the same results.
I have had conversations with Apple support and it seems there is no official support for Boot Camp after install. They have no useful information beyond blaming Microsoft and/or AMD and acknowledging that there are threads at Apple communities that confirm people are having this issue.
For those of you with the Retina 5K, can you get the AMD Boot Camp drivers to function? If so, what did you do to make it work?
Can you list your specific hardware load out?
I am not concerned about true 5K support in Windows, that is not the issue at this point. The issue is that the AMD Boot Camp drivers will install, but Windows refuses to load them and returns a 'code 43' error.
Retina 5K - 3.5GHz i5, 8GB ram, AMD Radeon R9 M290X 2048MB
iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, Late 2014), OS X Yosemite (10.10)
Novelty Condom
Level 1
(1 points)
Solved! Here is the solution.
If you are installing Boot Camp Windows 8, 8.1, 10 (technical preview) and in the Windows Device Manager you see an error (exclamation mark) next to the Display Adapter entry, and on the properties page a "Code 43" error is displayed, then the drivers provided by Boot Camp have failed to load and Windows is using a basic display driver that will not take advantage of the 3D acceleration capabilities of the video hardware. Games, CAD applications, and etc. will not function as expected. There are no drivers available as of this date that remedy this issue. I've gone so far as to recompile driver packages and was never able to get past the Code 43 error.
The fix:
Forget Windows 8, 8.1, 10. the Code 43 issue is not fixable using these version of Windows.
Install Windows 7. That's it. Problem solved. Code 43 did not appear on the first install of Windows 7, but was trivial to replicate when installing any other version.
Installing Windows 7 was more complicated than I counted on. The basic Windows 7 install disc does not include bluetooth or USB 3.0 drivers. Boot Camp attempts to solve this by slip-streaming those drivers into the install.
If you have any other USB device plugged into the iMac this slip-stream will fail. Only your Windows USB and Boot Camp support USB should be plugged in. In my case I have a USB mouse I prefer over the stock Apple mouse. This prevented the Bluetooth drivers from activating and I was stuck at the language selection screen of the install with no mouse or keyboard. Plugging in a wired mouse and keyboard did not solve this issue. Neither did disabling bluetooth in OSX and trying the install again.
I also encountered an issue where after creating the Boot Camp partition, when the computer would reboot to start the Windows install, I would get a "No bootable device" error and a full computer stop. If I held down Option when rebooting I could select the Windows USB as the boot device and the install would start, but the needed drivers would not load. The only way I found to fix this was to reboot into OSX, open Boot Camp Assistant and remove the Windows partition, exit Boot Camp Assistant, open BCA again and recreate the partition, then reboot. Then do this over and over and over (and over, and over, and over again) until it didn't give me this error. It took 8 tries for the computer to find the Windows boot drive on its own. Option, then selecting the Windows USB never worked. /usr/sbin/bless did not work. I had to delete the partition and recreate it with BCA, then reboot.
There are 192 updates to Windows 7 SP1 with a stock installation. It took 2.5 hours to complete the updates. I've tested the video hardware before and after the updates and can confirm the Code 43 error is not evident in my Windows 7 Boot Camp install, and 3D hardware and drivers are functioning as expected.
