Error 0x80300024

I have just solved this problem on my mid 2010 27" iMac running Sierra. It has a factory fitted 256Gb SSD and second 2Tb internal hard disc. I hit this very frustrating problem. I really didn't want to install BootCamp Windows 7 on my SSD, and I definitely didn't want to open my iMac and unplug the SSD just to do a Windows install to drive 2. In desperation I decided to try a minimum install on the SSD with the intention of moving a lot of Windows files onto the second hard drive - it wasn't perfect, but it would have been a 'least worst' option. But the great news is, in trying this, I stumbled upon a fairly simple way of doing the install to the second drive only 🙂

My plan was to attempt Bootcamp to 2nd drive, let it fail, but during the attempt format the partition on drive 2 to NTFS so that after doing minimum install of BootCamp to my SSD, the drive 2 partition would be ready to configure so most of the Windows files could occupy the Drive 2 partition. It would be a pain configuring directories to point to the second drive, but needs must, so I gave it a go and arrived at what for me was a perfect solution, so here's what I did...

1. Used Boot Camp Assistant to partition my 2Tb second drive with a 250Gb BOOTCAMP partition

2. Do the Windows 7 Pro install from DVD in built in SuperDrive

2a. Install fails because partition isn't NTFS

2b. Use Windows Installer Advanced Disc options to format the partition to NTFS

2c. As expected, install fails with the dreaded 0x80300024 error

...so now for the magic...

3. Use Boot Camp Assistant to create small BOOTCAMP partition on the SSD - in my case 41Gb was the minimum it would allow, but don't worry - you will get this space back at the end 😀

4. Do the Windows 7 Pro install again, but **IMPORTANT** choose the original partition you created in 1 above, not the small one on the SSD. In my case, to my surprise, it just worked this time!!

4a. A couple of reboots, normal Windows 7 install proceeds to completion on drive 2

5. Use Boot Camp Assistant to return the SSD to a single partition

Happy Days, now we have Windows 7 installed to the 2nd drive, and have all our space back for OSX on the SSD

Other things, don't forget to set default boot drive in OSX settings, presumably you will want OSX as the default?

Install the Apple windows drivers in Windows 7 by running BootCamp\Drivers\Setup.exe from the usb you created if you followed the Boot Camp Assistant steps

I hope this works for others!

You might want to ask this over in one of the apple windows communities.

TheHatter found the solution to this and it worked for me. Remove all of your internal drives except for the one where you're installing Windows. That's it.

For some reason, the Windows 7 installer gets confused about the multiple drives on Mac Pros.

I got the same error when installing Hyper-V (it has a Windows 7 kernel) on my 2011 Mac-mini which has 2 drives. Being in the "No way am I yanking drives from my mac-mini" camp, I found an easier way. I booted from the recovery partition (you could boot from a system CD, as well) and specifically "re-partitioned" the drive I was going to do the install on; choosing the Windows boot sector option (I can't remember what it was... it was the last option). Then it installed fine.

I'm assuming you've got 2 drives and trying to install on one of them and leave the other alone. If you're installing on different partitions on the drive drive then you're probably hosed.

I just resolved the 0x80300024 bootcamp error in the following way:

I have a 2011 mac mini with an internal SSD and an internal HDD. I wanted to split the SSD and install win7 on it.

Basically this is a variation on the "remove your other hard drives" solution posted here and elsewhere.

Because my internal HDD was still pretty empty, I just re-partitioned it all as "free space" and then bootcamp and win7 behaved properly. So this is a non-physical way of preventing the GUID table on another drive messing with win7's delicate sensibilities.

My two cents.

This error was driving me crazy. Spent hours on it but I finally found a workaround that didn't require me to disconnect my drive. I have an early 2008 MacBook Pro with an internal SSD and HDD in place of the optical drive so disconnecting the drive would have been a real hassle. I tried re-partitioning my extra drive as free space like the above post mentioned but I didn't work for me. Finally what I did was format my extra drive using the FAT file system in the Mac OS and connected an external hard drive I have. Honestly I'm not sure if it was the external hard drive or the formatting that did the trick but it worked. I would appreciate it if anyone can confirm this works as I don't really want to go through all of it again to find out.

Can you please give a bit more details about this. Or if anybody found other solutions.

I am in the same case, can't disconect the internal SSD... and don't really understand how was your trick with "connecting an external drive" (@dathiene) ...

anyhelp apreciated...

This worked for me. Thank you.

Incredible. It worked.

I have a MacBook Pro 13' mid 2010 with a 128GB Internal SSD and 256GB Internal HDD and I am installing Windows7 via USB dualbooting my SSD.

I re-formatted the internal HDD (which I had recently formatted so it was completely empty anywas) to MS-DOS (FAT). After that the error did not return.

I thought this was going to much more of a headache!

Thank you for you comment. I probably never would have tried this if you hadn't included your setup in the comment, which was similar to mine.

Thanks everyone for posting. This got me through the impasse. 🙂

I have MBP 2012 with crucial SSD for main drive and HDD for drive 2. I installed El Capitan recently, up from Mtn Lion.

I want to run Mac OS from SSD and Windows 7 from my HDD -- I'm paranoid enough about viruses to keep them on separate disks, I really have very little Windows experience...

I did eventually remove my SSD (not too difficult and wiping either drive completely wasn't an option). Once in Windows installer, I formatted the bootcamp disk (it wasn't named anything at the time on the Windows side, I recognized it by its size) -- formatted it so it's NTFS, didn't have to make it FAT in Mac OS.

And things went relatively smoothly from there. So, thanks!

Oh, and thanks to Dominic from Apple Support for pointing me to this error message.

Don't use windows Utilities to change the size of any drive with Mac OS X on it. Use only BootCamp.

Windows does not recognize that there are any other Operating Systems in the world, so it happily overwrites the Mac OS X partitions.

Your tip to create the small Bootcamp partition on the primary OS X drive, but actually install Windows on the second drive worked for me. Thanks for sharing!