Boot Camp Trouble

Hi I have this exact same problem also with the exact same Late 2014 machine with Retina Display.

Mightymayo wrote:

Hi I have this exact same problem also with the exact same Late 2014 machine with Retina Display.

Do you also have a 3Tb Fusion drive?

Nope. That didn’t work either. Same Result.

How do you figure what updates to stop at?

You think a downgrade would fix it? I thought I read somewhere someone trying that without success. But I might give it a go otherwise.

brandonschuk wrote:

https://www.reddit.com/r/bootcamp/comments/bdb81o/windows_10_installer_crashing_late_2014_5k_imac/

I looked at the post, which has very few details. Someone has also tried to go back to Yosemite and it still fails. If EFI was updated and is broken, downgrading just the OS will not help. Apple stopped separate firmware updates, which creates a problem.

You have a 3TB Fusion drive, which means only an EFI installation will work, because MBRs only support 2TiB.

On a 3TB Fusion drive, using the the 3TB HDD disk for Windows, the possible partitioning schemes are

• A sandwich layout used on CoreStorage (pre-APFS) Macs - EFI, macOS, Windows, macOS on the HDD. This accommodates a Windows partition less than 1TB and is suitable for Hybrid MBRs and BIOS installation of W7/W8.1. This is used on 2012 and older Macs. On these Macs, if the Windows partition is larger than 1TB, then the layout becomes - EFI, macOS, Windows. Recovery HD has been omitted on CS layouts to avoid confusion. A MBR must be less than 2TiB, and must start within the first 2TiB, so any disk larger than 4TiB is not supported for MBRs.

• A standard layout (APFS and 2013 or later UEFI Macs) - EFI, macOS, Windows without needs a Hybrid MBR. 2012 Macs are not supported as noted in If you see the alert 'Installation cannot proceed with Boot Camp configured' - Apple Support. Note this statement : If you have iMac (27-inch, Late 2012), you can install macOS Mojave using the steps below — but after the update, you cannot use Boot Camp to install Windows.

You have a 2014 Mac, so it allows the second option on APFS with 3TB Fusion drives. If you are able to create the USB2 Installer, using Create+Download and it has the EFI installer included, we can try the Alt/Option method to install Windows, since you already have a partition. You may see an error about EFI being NTFS, which can be resolved.

• Use BCA, remove the current partition
• Create a partition via BCA, which is 1TiB+, so we can manually create a MBR using GPT Fdisk
• We can install using BIOS mode, instead of EFI and see what we get.

The win32kfull.sys is nasty, because it is looking for drivers, which should already be in $WinPEDriver$ which is built as part of the Windows installer.

• Can you verify that the USB has a $WinPEDriver$?
• Can you post the contents of AutoUnattend.xml to PasteBin and post a link here?

You may end up rebuilding the USB2 Installer to cleanup any 5.x drivers from the USB.

If you do not have USB2, then you can use http://codeabitwiser.com/2014/03/how-to-install-windows-7-with-only-usb-3-0-ports/ but it requires a Windows PC. This is valid for W8.1/W10 as well.

We are creating an overlay, without modifying the existing content. The MBR allows the BIOS mode installer to work, without the GPT vs MBR error. The EFI installer is not working correctly, so we want to run the BIOS installer.

No I have the 1TB Fusion Drive. Late 2014 with Retina Display. I will keep an I on this post to see how you guys get on but Using the Terminal window to that extent is off putting for me. Like others I have tried different versions of windows, different versions of OS X. Different USB drives. Various different formatting of BootCamp partition. It does not matter whether you use Bootcamp to create the Partition or any other method it will still see it as GPT partition. The guy I am speaking with now in Apple support believes it’s to do with the Fusion drive and we are presently trying new install from scratch after having erased the fusion drive using Terminal Window first.

If it happed to succeed I will let ye know.

Bye Good Luck.

I can install W10 1803 in BIOS mode on a 2014 iMac under macOS Sierra.

BC Drivers are 6.0.6136 for W10 1803.

diskutil list 
/dev/disk0 (internal, physical):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *121.3 GB   disk0
   1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:          Apple_CoreStorage Macintosh HD            121.0 GB   disk0s2
   3:                 Apple_Boot Boot OS X               134.2 MB   disk0s3

/dev/disk1 (internal, physical):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *1.0 TB     disk1
   1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk1s1
   2:          Apple_CoreStorage Macintosh HD            684.9 GB   disk1s2
   3:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD             650.0 MB   disk1s3
   4:       Microsoft Basic Data BOOTCAMP                314.5 GB   disk1s4

/dev/disk2 (internal, virtual):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:                  Apple_HFS Macintosh HD           +800.0 GB   disk2
                                 Logical Volume on disk0s2, disk1s2
                                 E42F07F4-DBC6-4718-A535-5F0E83C319C5
                                 Unencrypted Fusion Drive

/dev/disk3 (external, physical):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:     FDisk_partition_scheme                        *16.0 GB    disk3
   1:                 DOS_FAT_32 WININSTALL              16.0 GB    disk3s1

/dev/disk4 (disk image):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        +3.0 TB     disk4
   1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk4s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS Time Machine Backups    3.0 TB     disk4s2

riMac:~ sudo fdisk /dev/disk1
Password:
Disk: /dev/disk1	geometry: 121601/255/63 [1953525168 sectors]
Signature: 0xAA55
         Starting       Ending
 #: id  cyl  hd sec -  cyl  hd sec [     start -       size]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
 1: EE 1023 254  63 - 1023 254  63 [         1 -     409639] <Unknown ID>
 2: AC 1023 254  63 - 1023 254  63 [    409640 - 1337630176] <Unknown ID>
 3: AB 1023 254  63 - 1023 254  63 [1338039816 -    1269536] Darwin Boot 
*4: 07 1023 254  63 - 1023 254  63 [1339310080 -  614213632] HPFS/QNX/AUX

I will test EFI Mode in the next couple of days.