Bootcamp not booting in Big Sur using Macbook Pro Late 2014

MBP late 2013, 256/8gb.

I’ve had a lot of ups and downs lately with this. I went back to Catalina, using my TM back up and lost Bootcamp in the process. I then tried to reinstall it (Win10) but couldn’t. Went back to Big Sur a few weeks later. Had several goes yesterday to get Win 10 up and running but no success. One try today and it worked. The only thing I did differently between then and now was to download and install Parallels 16. However it wouldn’t give me another free trial so I uninstalled it. Maybe it left some code on my MBP that fixed the problem. You could give it a go.

Click on System Preferences -> Privacy -> Full Disk Access and check if System Preferences is shown in the right hand pane.

That's unfortunate. I already had complex configuration (I have sort of portable windows drive) but somehow it has worked for me. Before upgrading to Big Sur, I had to bootin into windows portable ssd using an option button and it never faultered. However, after upgrade, pressing the option button did show both operating systems but when I clicked windows 10, it would process for few moments and instead of loggin in, it would say no bootable device..... I then downgraded to Catalina (Fresh installaion) and now it too had same problem. Then I logged into mac (Catalina), connected my SSD to mac via USB and ensured that it was visible in finder. Then went to preferences and chose the sytsem to boot into windows after next restart. This worked. I tried the same trick while in Big Sur and it didn't work. Strange but this is what is happeing.

The problem here is not the holding down of the option key to boot into Windows. That’s how it’s actually done! I had Win 10 working perfectly on my MBP (late 2013 256gb) before the move to Big Sur. I had to remove the Win 10 partition to make space for it and that was my mistake. After the install I the had plenty of free space for Win 10 but now it refused to install. My MBP also became quite slow so I’m guessing that the update is not quite correct for it. My problem was that the Bootcamp partition remained empty after going through the setup. A 40gb partition completely empty and no holding down of the option key would boot that!! I also tried Parallels 16 free trial (I had Parallels 10 some years ago) which installed but then crashed when doing a web search and did other weird things. I have gone back to Catalina, downloaded the latest Win 10 .iso and after just 3 attempts 😁 it finally worked. I’ll leave it alone for the time being as I cannot waste any more time on it.

gianfranco09 wrote:

Hoping for a miracle this season...

Take a look at

• Boot process of Mac computers - Apple Support
• Boot process of Mac computers without an Apple T2 Security Chip - Apple Support
• https://eclecticlight.co/2020/09/16/boot-volume-layout/

The role of boot.efi is documented. Till Apple can work out the gremlins in Big Sur UEFI, my recommendation is to stay on Catalina.

YOU NEED TO READ THIS.

I'm on OS 11 Big Sur on a MBP late 2013, 256gb with 8gb ram.

You no longer actually need Bootcamp. I had Parallels some years ago, it was good but it cost me quite a lot of money. As time went on and OSX updated, it stopped working and their update cost "quite a lot more money" so I ditched it and used Bootcamp. A bit messy having to reboot everytime you needed Windows 10 (in my case). But now a type of Parallels is back and it's absolutely FREE. MacFormat has made my day. I hope they don't mind me reposting this but it's all in a good cause. Go to bit.ly/mac361vmwfusion and click "register now" to get a FREE licence to run this Parallels clone for free for ever (well for a long time anyway).

In the event it wasn't as easy as they said but I persisted, actually signed up on the web page and eventually I got an email with my free activation key. And it works a treat. Only trouble I'm having is running BlueStacks, which refuses to load completely. This is probably because of a Ram issue. If anyone has a fix please let me know.

Before NVRAM Reset, Alt/Option shows two disks - macOS and Windows.

After NVRAM Reset, Alt/Option shows three disks - macOS, Windows and EFI Boot.

Select EFI Boot boots Windows, but selecting Windows does not. Is that correct?

I have a MacBook Pro 2014 15 inch. I had a similar problem with Big Sur. I had not installed Windows on it.

• I put System Preferences in the Full Disk Access list.
• I ran through the Book Camp Assistant
• The Mac refused to boot into Windows, so I restarted and held down the option key so it showed available disks to boot from.
• 3 disks appeared on the boot screen. Choosing "Windows' doesn't do anything, you have to choose "EFI Boot". This will boot from the USB key.
• Move on with installing windows.

Bootcamp can be frustrating to install. It took me several tries. However, if you want Windows on your MBP without any hassle there's an excellent programme from VMware, link here https://www.vmware.com/products/desktop-hypervisor.html which will do just that. It's similar to Parallels but it's absolutely FREE. Not just a free download but a free license also. Hope this helps.

See Mac OS Catalina doesn't see Boot Camp on … - Apple Community as an example.

I am having the same Windows 10 boot-up problem on my mid-2014 15" MacBook Pro after upgrading to mac OS Big Sur. I really do not want to have to reinstall Windows 10 using bootcamp and have not had any issues with bootcamp on past versions of mac OS including latest version of Catalina. I granted full disk access to System Preferences, but computer still won't boot into Windows. When I open my bootcamp hard drive icon on my desktop I can see all of my Windows files and folders. When I go into Disk Utility and select my Bootcamp partition the First Aid option is greyed out. I am fairly computer literate but don't want to risk doing something that accidentally deletes my Windows 10 partition and data. It would be extremely helpful and greatly appreciated to have a detailed, step-by-step procedure on how to fix this issue without having to reinstall Windows 10. Thanks in advance for your help.

So, one of the trick has worked for me.

Open System Preferences > Startup Disk > Choose Windows Boot Camp as Boot drive and restart your mac. It boots into windows OS directly.

Though I had already downgraded back to Catalina but still it doesn't boot into windows in an external SSD. Hope they fix the issue soon.

I have the same problem on the same model. Allowing application full access to the this doesn't make any difference and only the now Macbook models boot Windows using EFI the old ones like mine use standard BIOS.

After some auto reboots mine show a folder with question mark and the url support.apple.com/startup

Also I am having problem using my Window 10 VM in VMWare Fusion it is extremely slow impossible to use now on Big Sur, even disabling a feature to prevent meldown and spectre.

Just share here with you that I had a phonecall from Applecare and they asked questions about this issue.

He asked when installed Big Sur and asked me to restart and tell what happens.

And it booted again in Apple and not windows, although it was set as startingdisk in Apple (and windows).

They had me run and I uploaded the results of the systemdiagnose.

He said Appleteam bootcamp will for sure investigate this and it will be resolved in an update.

Hope this will speedup the resolvent if this issue.

I have uninstalled both Paragon's NTFS & Linux file system software.

I can still see the drive in Finder.

I can now see the drive in Startup Disk.

Windows is selected as the boot disk but at boot the white spinning circle of doom just spins and spins until it finally just swaps to macOS.

Going to reset NVRAM again and check to see if it shows up when I use the Option key after resetting the NVRAM. (just barely uninstalled both of those software packages.