I have managed to do it.
Unfortunately, the way to do it was slightly tortuous, reflecting the history of my Mac. And with the free W10 offer expired, the information may be less useful now...
I had installed Windows 7 32 bit with bootcamp on my Mac Mini 3,1 (aka early 2009), as back then I did not have too much RAM, only 2GB, and supposed 32 bit would work better with that memory. Afterwards, I upgraded to 8GB (and an SSD for good measure), but never got to upgrade W7 to 64 bit, as that needed a reinstall. When upgrading to W10, I decided that I'd like to move to 64bits... but that also needs a clean reinstall. So I procrastinated and did nothing for a while.
After the Microsoft e-mails of "29th of July is the last day of the free upgrade offer", I backed up all relevant files, and hoped for the best.
I did have to use the W10 upgrade program (the notification did not seem to work well) when running W7 on the MacMini, and after making space (15GB are needed) and selecting Windows as the BootCamp default booting system (for the reboots), everything went smoothly: all the programs were there, all the drivers and I had a 32bit W10 working. And a W10 license that I could use to reinstall.
I did go through the 32 bit W10 because I did not know how would I be able to get a W10 license if I reinstalled from scratch, but maybe I could have done it in just one step… who knows.
After that, I went through the motions to get the 64bit version of W10, which is slightly more involved, as some few things are not supported.
I started by downloading the W10 Media Creation Tool, and creating an USB drive with Windows 10 64 bit in my language.
After that, I booted on Mac OS X Yosemite (maybe el Capitán is better for this, I don’t know) and went through the BootCamp assistant to download the latest support drivers for Windows (that downloads the W7 version in a MacMini3,1) and install them in the USB.
Unfortunately, the created USB is not able to boot successfully, so I went back to W10 and the media Creation tool and created a DVD with the W10 media. This time, the Mac was able to boot successfully into the W10 installer and then I was able to install W10 64 bit, with a default VGA screen, not pretty to see… So I plugged the USB created with the W7 support, clicked on the \WindowsSupport\setup.exe, and it completely did nothing. But then a W10 popup recommended to restart the program with compatibility options and with that, the driver installation started. It got hanged in the installation of the SimgaTel audio driver, but I was able to keep on progressing by killing that installer only and let the program go.
After that, I got a working screen drivers, but, as suspected, the audio was not working. Doing some research online, it turns out that the MacMini3,1 does have a RealTek audio Chipset not a Sigmatel, so i tried to install the Realtek drivers and there it was: my full W10 installation on a Mac Mini (early 2009).
It’s probably too early to know all the things that do not work, but for now, Video, networking, audio, USB and the printers do work ok.
The only thing that has resisted me, is that I have not been able to create a W10 installation DVD with the added BootCamp WindowSupport directory that is usable to boot... you can't have everything
Rick Nagtegaal
Level 1
(12 points)
lllaass
Level 10
(188,027 points)
