Boot Camp - Setup was unable to create a new system partition....from Windows install

If you're trying to use USB flash stick make sure it is 2.0 NOT 3.0! This is due to Windows 7 NOT being compatible with USB 3.0 until AFTER you install drivers. As you can imagine, while trying to load Windows 7 to your Macbook, the 3.0 drivers have not yet been installed and hence the partition issues. Cheers!

Exactly! I struggled for 2 hours with all kinds of issues, then realized the USB stick I was using was 3.0 .. My new MacBook pro only has usb3 drives, but you must use a usb2 device. I plugged in an old external usb2 harddrive (couldnt' find a USB 2.0 flash drive laying around that was big enough) and it all worked! whew.

Hi guys.

I was trying to install Windows 7 Home Premium on Mac Book Air (Early 2014) running OS X 10.9.5 Mavericks.

Similarly, I encountered the famous "Setup was unable to create a new system partition or locate an existing system partition" error.

This is what worked:

1. Remove Autoattend.xml from the "Drivers" USB stick.

Initially, the windows 7 installation window had a white background.

After you do this step, the background of the installation window was blue with a text box saying "Install Now" and you have to click on a blue circle with an arrow to proceed.

2. Copy the remaining contents of "Drivers" USB stick onto the "Windows 7" USB stick root directory.

This was mentioned by someone else in this thread. Thanks a lot! Apparently this for your Mac to "see" that there are driver files before it lets you proceed.

3. I used a USB 2.0 memory stick

Do the normal Bootcamp procedure with 1 USB stick only, in the RIGHT USB port. I did not remove the USB stick or change it's position during the setup.

Viola! Hope this helps! I spent countless hours before I got it right, so do not despair.

Using a USB 3 stick was my problem as well. USB 2 stick on left USB 2 port worked like a charm.

Giving up is the only solution. I wasted 3 hours of my life trying get bootcamp going on my 2014 mac mini. I already had Win 8 running on VM Ware but I decided this wasn't good enough and a moment of insanity struck me... I decided to try doing Windows 7 using bootcamp. This was a waste of my existence. I have an external superdrive and a Windows 7 DVD and decided to run the setup without trying to make a USB installer, because I can't fathom the amount of misery that would be manufactured in attempting to create such a device based on my luck and experience. Anyway, here are the steps I took that led to me giving up:

1. Ran bootcamp - created a 40gb space for windows, downloaded the mac drivers onto a USB drive. It read my windows disk no problem, and restarted into the Windows 7 installer. I was all smiles at this point.

2. Then the fail began - it didn't read the drive that bootcamp set up for me because it had to be NTFS. OK, so I'll just go ahead and format that partition... Nope, didn't work. Tried this several times.

3. Then I tried switching around the usb ports, and removed my external USB drive based on reading this forum. It sounded like a good suggestion at the time. With the installer running, it still didn't want to install on the newly formatted NTFS partition. So I decided to reboot, and boot up to the DVD using "option" while booting up the mac.

4. The fail continues... It goes to the install screen again, and then we had a new problem... the keyboard and mouse were not being recognized. No input received. I don't know if this is the DVD's fault or the Mac's fault, but they WERE working before I rebooted the installer. I don't understand why it all of a sudden decided to do this. I tried switching around the USB ports again and it still wouldn't read the keyboard or mouse.

5. After several reboots and USB switchings, my superdrive decided to start making weird clicking noises and not booting to the install screen so this is when I decided to give up on boot camp.

6. I wanted that 40 gb of hard drive space back, and Disk Utility kept giving me an error about not being able to resize the main partition. After reading dozens of forums, I discovered I had to boot to recovery mode and run disk utility in terminal from there to get this back for some reason... worlds of fun that was!

7. I was still committed, though. I was going to get Windows 7 on this computer one way or the other, so I decided to try installing a new VM Ware machine using my Windows 7 disk.

8. Much to my amazement, that worked. However, when I tried to activate my copy of Windows 7, it tried to tell me the copy wasn't genuine.

9. I did not want to go through the insanely tedious method of cracking windows just for this. And this is especially ridiculous since this is a legitimate copy of Win 7 I obtained from Dreamspark. I have used this same disk to install Win 7 on multiple machines (and bootcamp on older Macs).

10. This is when I gave up on the idea entirely and realized I needed a Masters in Com Sci to achieve this task, in general.

Conclusion: THIS SHOULD NOT BE THIS DIFFICULT. I'm sure there was some amount of user error involved, but still. I've installed bootcamp multiple times on my '08 Imac and '07 Macbook, with little to no failure of this magnitude. Maybe it's my disk, maybe the superdrive... who knows. The bottom line: Live your life. Bootcamp is only a dream (on newer Macs). It is not worth the hours of suffering just to have a copy of a substandard OS to occasionally boot to. If you must, I recommend Windows 8 on VM Ware fusion. Works fine for me and that's what I'm going to stick with.

Nick Vogel wrote:

Conclusion: THIS SHOULD NOT BE THIS DIFFICULT. I'm sure there was some amount of user error involved, but still. I've installed bootcamp multiple times on my '08 Imac and '07 Macbook, with little to no failure of this magnitude. Maybe it's my disk, maybe the superdrive... who knows. The bottom line: Live your life. Bootcamp is only a dream (on newer Macs). It is not worth the hours of suffering just to have a copy of a substandard OS to occasionally boot to. If you must, I recommend Windows 8 on VM Ware fusion. Works fine for me and that's what I'm going to stick with.

It is not. I have installed Windows in 45 minutes via BCA in the Apple Store.

1. Apple BCA does not/will not create a NTFS partition, it will ONLY create a FAT partition, which the Windows Installer can format as it needs. This is documented - https://help.apple.com/bootcamp/mac/5.0/help/#/bcmp173b3bf2.

2. It is possible to resolve this problem when it happens with simple steps. This is due to BCA failing to execute the appropriate creation of a Hybrid MBR. This is a known issue. On newer Macs, this is not even necessary for EFI installations. Also see #3.

3. The use of Alt to boot from DVDs is valid only if Windows is begin installed using EFI on late 2013+ Macs. W7 has inadequate support for EFI. W8+ is much better. Prior Macs require an emulation environment called CSM-BIOS which is necessary for the installer to work correctly.

4. The USB port switching/removal causes problems. The USB should be a USB2 (not a USB3) and it has a set of drivers that are loaded to provide the installer the correct environment including devices drivers that support Apple Keyboard/Mouse (Wired and Bluetooth both). In W8 installation this is explicitly done using the $WinPEDriver$ (PE - Pre-boot Environment). Here is a W8 snippet. W7 uses a different method which BCA understands and 'integrates' the drivers on USB correctly.

<settings pass="windowsPE">

<component name="Microsoft-Windows-Setup"processorArchitecture="amd64"publicKeyToken="31bf3856ad364e35"language="neutral"versionScope="nonSxS"xmlns:wcm="http://schemas.microsoft.com/WMIConfig/2002/State"xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">

<UserData>

<ProductKey>

<WillShowUI>Always</WillShowUI>

</ProductKey>

</UserData>

<UpgradeData>

<Upgrade>true</Upgrade>

<WillShowUI>Always</WillShowUI>

</UpgradeData>

</component>

<component name="Microsoft-Windows-PnpCustomizationsWinPE"processorArchitecture="amd64"publicKeyToken="31bf3856ad364e35"language="neutral"versionScope="nonSxS"xmlns:wcm="http://schemas.microsoft.com/WMIConfig/2002/State"xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">

<DriverPaths>

<PathAndCredentials wcm:keyValue="1" wcm:action="add">

<Path>$WinPEDriver$</Path>

</PathAndCredentials>

</DriverPaths>

</component>

</settings>

5. A non-Functional superdrive does not come into play, if the first BCA option "Create USB.." is chosen on supported Macs. Was the Windows manually burned to a physical DVD? Burn rate issues can cause installer issues.

6. This is pretty adequately documented in Boot Camp: Solve partition creation problems.

7. VMware installations do not have access to underlying hardware. If the performance is adequate for your needs, it is a faster method. VMware provides its own BIOS emulation. Please see the .vmx file of your VM.

8. Licensing issues are an M$ issue, and can and do occur very frequently. M$ created problems in this area whenever there are HW modifications made. Replacing a failed drive requires calling M$ for reactivation. 😉 OSX can be installed at will on external media, if you so choose, using Macs.

9. Welcome to the world of M$ licensing. It is a very complex world for an OS that is probably the most pirated/virus-prone/hacked OS. My sympathies to M$ software developers.

10. It is fairly easy to install it. Search Engines can color perceptions on on how hard it is. If you start at How to install Windows using Boot Camp - Apple Support , your life is much simpler. The ASC can assist, as needed.

Hi All,

I have tried all the ways in all 5 pages with no luck. finally i have changed the usb 32g to another one and its work from first try.
there is something we can not noticed yet good luck with you

USB3 devices do not work, USB2 devices will work.

it could be. but my other USB 8G was also usb3 !!!

This is how I check if a USB device is a USB2 or USB3.

What ended up working for me was restoring it back to the single partition, putting it in recovery mode, verifying the disk, verifying disk permissions and then repairing the disk permissions, then going into boot camp again.

Mac Pro (late 2013) What worked for me was removing external drives.

This was a second install after Malware just killed my first PC system. I only use Bootcamp for limited PC gaming and was astounded at how easy it is to destroy Windows 8.1 with malware.

Funny enough but removing any external drive and changing the Flash drive to either left or right solves the problem.

Thanks for this solution! I unplugged all my devices except my keyboard and mouse, and deleted then recreated the partition. Windows has successfully installed! (Mac mini late 2014 OS X Mavericks)

Thank you, thank you, thank you. Been at this for a couple days. Your suggestion worked. I removed the USB stick that contained the Win7 ISO install file and I am passed the error message and onto installing windows.