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How to install Windows 8 on Mid 09 Macbook Pro (10.8.3)

So i loved the new Windows 8, and even had it installed before bootcamp supported windows 8 on my new iMac, i waited to buy a bigger hard drive and more ram for my mid 09 Macbook Pro. The day i bought the new hardware, Apple released 10.8.3, and an updated bootcamp to support Windows 8! Yay! I got my install disc out (iso file burned to DVD), opened up bootcamp assistant, only to get an error saying apple dropped support for my mid 09 Macbook Pro and Windows 8. Making the install impossible through bootcamp. Do not fret, i have the solution, and EVERYTHING works perfectly. Here we go.


  • Gather your Windows 8 install disc AND a Windows 7 install disc (you can surely find one by searching the net, use your old one, or borrow a colleagues... we are licensing Windows 8, NOT 7, this is just for my trick to fool bootcamp assistant and no i do not condone piracy)
  • Inside BootCamp Assistant, the driver download may hang,it did for me, twice..could be heavy usage due to the popular new update...so i recommend downloading it faster, and manually here http://support.apple.com/downloads/#macoscomponents and get 4.1.4586 yes this is for windows 7, ALSO while you are there, download the windows 8 support pack 5.0.5033, as we will need that later as well. As a matter of fact, DO IT THIS WAY and dont bother
  • That being said and done, in BootCamp Assistant (OSX), only check off Install Windows 7, leaving the download support software unchecked
  • Partition your hard drive as youd like, this splits up your storage space however you like, keep in mind which OS you plan to run the most, and obviously give that one more room, i.e you do all your Photoshop work, and app development in OSX, and only use Windows for office stuff, you'd want to give yourself more room on the OSX side. I however bought a huge new internal drive to split them basically in half, as i use them both frequently.
  • This step is where the trick comes. OSX 10.8.3 / BootCamp will advise you there is no support for Windows 8..only 7 with your Mid 09 Macbook Pro if you have put your Windows 8 disc in, upsetting you as it did me...possibly bringing you to this post, thats not FAIR is it? Your 09 MacBook Pro is still JUST AS GOOD as a lot of PC's running Windows 8, why they excluded this model i have no idea...im sure they had reasons, but i dont care at the moment..lol
  • INSTEAD place a Windows 7 install disc in, and click next. BootCamp Assistant will now partition your drive, make the windows side bootable and restart your MBP.
  • Let it do its thing, and eventually you will land at the Windows 7 installation interface. We don't really want that, we want Windows 8 right?
  • Click the "x" to close the installation for Windows 7, it threatens your MBP will restart, and allow it to do so.
  • **IMPORTANT** Once you hear the beloved Mac chime, quickly press and hold the "option" key.
  • This brings you to an area where you can select a startup disk. At this point, lets get rid of the trick. Hit your eject button and get rid of the Windows 7 install disc, we are done with it now.
  • You now, well in my case anyway, should only see your Mac HD, and the Recovery Disk.
  • Insert your Windows 8 install disc
  • Now WAIT. Eventually, you should see a new DVD looking icon that says Windows pop up next to the MacHD and Recovery Disk. (depending on what you called your iso, it may something else...not sure, but you cant miss the new entry)
  • This is where a wired mouse will be needed, or use tab/space/enter to navigate to the new Windows Disc icon and launch it.
  • You are now in Windows 8's installation interface, cool!
  • Follow the steps until it asks you where you want to install it. You should see a partition about equal to what you set earlier in BootCamp Assistant, and it SHOULD say Bootcamp right on it. Select this partition. (mine was the last one, the fourth i believe)
  • OH NO, it says you cant install it to that partition, this is normal. You need to highlight/select this partition, and click format. I cant remember, but i think you have to click "options" to get to a the spot where you can format it. Pretty straight forward. Safety check, obviously make sure you have the Bootcamp partition selected, dont format your Mac OSX partition!
  • After the quick format is done, Windows 8 installer will then allow you to click "next" and from there the magic happens.
  • Go through the whole Windows 8 install, and setup how you would like, this takes awhile, and im not covering that, as its a hand in hand walkthrough like any other install.
  • Once your inside your new Windows 8, you'll see a bunch of things not working, like tap to click on your trackpad, no on screen displays for brigtness, volume, and possibly other stuff. Not cool right?
  • Grab your USB stick, or Burnt disc that you applied the bootcamp support downloads to in the begining of this tutorial.
  • FIRST open the Windows 7 Bootcamp install, 4.1.4586, open the folder and find setup.exe and run it (we are in windows 8 now)
  • It takes a while, but Apple's BootCamp will install a bunch of drivers, etc, and eventually restart your MBP, which is cool, let it do it.
  • Upon finishing, lets go back to the USB/Burnt Disc where all your support software was saved, and lets get the newly support BootCamp 5.0.5033 opened up.
  • Big Thanks to a post by ErikVanD i seen on this forum for the next step.
  • If you want, try and click setup in this latest BootCamp support set, and you will get another sad error claiming x64 is not supported, something awful to that nature. Awww man, this far, only to get let down. Nope. We are going to fix that. And this is where ErikVanD's post pointed me to what we do next.
  • It was said to navigate in the BootCamp 5.0.5033 folder to something of the effect of BootCamp/Drivers/Apple and run the MSI file "BootCamp" (MSI file will say Windows Installer in its description, and not necessarily MSI for anyone not too savy with Windows) **note - NOT .bootcamp (notice the period in the front) and it should work and install the new Windows 8 support for your MBP...but in my case it didn't, which is why im posting how i fixed this. Your setup may somehow be different, but mine gave me an error say it "needs elevated permissions to run, use setup.exe instead. We tried that remember! And it gave us the x64 not supported error. Oh man! Blabbing aside, this file needs to be ran as an administrator, which yeah your the only user, but Windows is funny like that. Normally youd just right click, and select run as administrator, but out the box, that option isnt there when you right click, only install, repair, open with etc. Here's the next trick, you need to add a registry file to enable running as an administrator, dont be afraid, this is an old trick, and really easy.
  • Open notepad in Windows, and create a new doc, call it Add_MSI_run_as_administrator.reg
  • Paste this following code into the new doc
  • Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
    HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Msi.Package\Shell\runas] "HasLUAShield"="" [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Msi.Package\shell\runas\Command] @=hex(2):22,00,25,00,53,00,79,00,73,00,74,00,65,00,6d,00,52,00,6f,00,6f,00,74,\ 00,25,00,5c,00,53,00,79,00,73,00,74,00,65,00,6d,00,33,00,32,00,5c,00,6d,00,\ 73,00,69,00,65,00,78,00,65,00,63,00,2e,00,65,00,78,00,65,00,22,00,20,00,2f,\ 00,69,00,20,00,22,00,25,00,31,00,22,00,20,00,25,00,2a,00,00,00
  • Or download the file already made from my company server at http://www.theprojectdev.com/public/pub.html **i put this there as a courtesy to help others like me, its just a complete reg file, so either create your own through copy and pasting above or download it. Either way, put it on your desktop.
  • Now double click the new registry file, and allow/ok it to do its thing.
  • Once done, you can discard the file from your desktop, or keep, your choice.
  • Guess What!? Now we can do the impossible! Lets revisit that solution from before by going to the newest BootCamp 5.0.5033, and navigate to BootCamp/drivers/Apple and select that tricky BootCamp MSI file that wouldnt allow us to run, this time RIGHT CLICK it. Because of our new registry entry we placed, we now have an option to "Run as Administrator" Click that option.
  • WooHoo! We have done what coudnt be done, BootCamp will now walk you through the installer, and add all the great support for Windows 8 on your mid 09 Macbook Pro that they for some reason neglected!
  • After the update, you will endure yet another restart. From there, most likely using a wired mouse still, navigate to the system tray icon on the bottom right corner of the screen (little up arrow) and click it. It will pop up a little menu, showing system processes/stuff running, click the gray squared diamond (this is bootcamp) and it will bring up the newest BootCamp control panel. From here, you can nav to trackpad/touchpad and set tap to click (finally) and gestures, etc. This control panel has lots of good stuff to make a MBP user feel comfortable in Windows 8. There you go! You did it!



I really, sincerely hope this helps someone, as it really made my day to get this resolved. I want to add that all On Screen Displays will work (your volume/brightness etc) they keyboard backlighting, and so much more, it really works great. I upgraded my hard drive to 1tb, and installed 8gb of PNY RAM from best buy ($40) and it runs Windows 8, AND OSX fantastically.


My company http://www.theprojectdev.com designs and develops mobile apps (iOS and Android) and web design and development, so im a heavy user of both OS's, and this setup is just the best thing that has happened to me in a portable sense. Runs so so so fast! Enjoy everyone!

MacBook Pro, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.2)

Posted on Mar 17, 2013 8:28 PM

Reply
187 replies

Jul 30, 2014 10:35 AM in response to projectRelentless

Hey Guys


I have a MacBook Pro 2009 which has Mavericks installed. I did have Windows 7 installed also but did a complete upgrade to 8 then to 8.1.


The problem I am having is that I can not install the Bootcamp software at all be it version 4.0.xxxx, 4.1.xxxx, 5.x.xxx or 5.1.xxx.


Every single time I try to install it, I get an error message saying "Bootcamp requires that your computer is running Windows 7"


Any suggestions/help would be greatly appreciated as this is driving me nuts


Thanks Guys


Huza91

Aug 20, 2014 5:48 AM in response to projectRelentless

Hi guys,


so I have managed to install Windows 8 on my Macbook Pro Mid 2009 (with a bootable USB stick thanks to Enable Bootcamp to install from usb for OSX 10.9**WORKS**. and this forum). When tried to install windows 8 using that USB stick and a Boot Camp partition I got the following messages:


"Windows cannot be installed to this disk. The selected disk has an MBR partition table. On EFI systems, Windows can only be installed to GPT disks"


"Windows cannot be installed to this hard disk space. Windows must be installed to a partition formatted as NTFS"


"Windows cannot be installed to this disk. This computer's hardware may not support booting to this disk. Ensure that the disks's controller is enabled in the computer's BIOS menu"


After some googling I found this thread http://superuser.com/questions/481650/cant-use-bootcamp-partition-for-windows-8- installation so I restored the Boot Camp partition, allocated 'free space' for the Windows 8 using Disk Utility and managed to install Windows 8 on that partition.


HOWEVER, when the installation finished without any errors the computer restarts and by holding down ALT key I then choose to boot from freshly installed Windows 8. The Windows 8 logo appears and the loading sign below it, then it says it is installing some devices and once that is finished the screen goes completely black and nothing happens. Restarting again and the Windows logo appears and the loading sign as well but the screen goes black again. The HDD is running but nothing happens. Any thoughts on how I can fix this?


Specs,

OSX 10.9.4

Mid 2009

8Gb RAM

200Gb partition for windows 8 (HDD in total 750Gb)

HDD installed where Optical Drive was since the main HDD cable is broken


-DoriEi

Aug 25, 2014 5:30 AM in response to projectRelentless

Hello everyone.



I eat a lot of entrants in this post have MacBook Pro and seek a solution to install BootCamp, and sometimes things get complicated.



That was my case.



I built the log file but every time I tried to install bootcamp I went out that was not compatible, my mistake it sounds silly I want to share with you.



I recommend you to check the log file switch the windows as shown in the first post, since by just copy and paste did not realize that when you paste in the blok added this note to the file spaces.

just let me go to registration and modificardo but could not install.

observe carefully spoken numbers and spaces between commas, delete and voila ... fixed ..



Greetings

Dec 15, 2014 3:46 PM in response to projectRelentless

I followed your steps and failed to install the BootCamp5.0.5033 Software.

installing BootCamp4.0.4033 went without Problems and execution of reg file "Add_MSI_run_as_administrator.reg" was confirmed. When trying to install the BootCamp5.0.5033 Software via Setup file as administrator this failed and the message "Bootcamp x64 is not supported on this Computer Modell" came up.


System information:

Macbook Pro 7.1 Vers: 10.6.8

6.2.9200 Build 9200

x64 based PC

Intel cor 2duo cpu p8800 2660 MHz

Bios-Vers: Apple inc MBP71.88Z0039.1003251322.25.03.2010


Any idea?

Jan 20, 2015 10:20 AM in response to projectRelentless

I followed the latest version of these steps, but Windows 8.1 is stuck in a bootloop after Bootcamp’s driver installation (mid-2009 mbp - system info. below post). I'm able to install 8.1 successfully, and I'm able to install the bootcamp drivers successfully. However, right after I reboot (after the drivers are installed), startup fails: windows begins to boot, then fades to black, and then reboots in a loop. This happens with both Bootcamp 4.0.4033 and Bootcamp 5.0.5033 (no problems adding the reg. file either). Any help would be much appreciated.


Thanks again for the guide. I'm impressed that 8.1 can run on my 2009 mbp to begin with. Any assistance with driver support would be especially appreciated - thank you.



System Information:

MacBookPro5,5

Intel Core 2 Duo 2.53 GHz

Bios: MBP55.00AC.B03

Feb 7, 2015 9:06 PM in response to vrl2

Update: I've narrowed it down to the NVIDIA driver.

Details: I took the following steps to install Windows 8.1 on my late-2009 13” Macbook Pro. I’m also able to install the latest bootcamp drivers (5.1.5621). Unfortunately, the system fails to boot if I install any version of the NVIDA driver for my GeForce 9400M. The system’s video runs as “Windows Basic Display” as a result, and I can’t take advantage of the GPU. Not sure what to try next - any help would be appreciated.

Steps to install Windows w/ Bootcamp Drivers:


1) (Note: I’ve replaced my superdrive with a separate drive for Windows 8.1, and Mavericks is on it’s own SSD). In Disk Utility, create single a free space partition on the Windows 8.1 drive.


2) Modify and Bootcamp’s Info.plist according to the steps shown here:

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1414851

and sign it with:

sudo codesign -fs - /Applications/Utilities/Boot\ Camp\ Assistant.app


3) Using Bootcamp Assistant, create a bootable USB (in “select tasks,” also check the second box to download the latest support software from Apple).


4) Reboot with “option” and select the USB (now labeled EFIboot)


5) Use the windows installer to create a new partition, format it, and install windows


6) Download the latest bootcamp drivers from Apple (version 5.1.561 - although same results with all versions of 5.0 drivers). Since “setup.exe” gives an error, navigate to “\BootCamp\Drivers\Apple\BootCamp.msi” and run it from an elevated command prompt to install bootcamp drivers.


7) **IMPORTANT: At this point, the NVIDIA drivers that come with bootcamp (v. 337.88) cause windows to crash. Just before reaching the login prompt, the screen goes blank and the system reboots. Uninstalling the NVIDIA graphics drivers in Safe Mode allows Windows to boot - except with poor video support.


8) To fix the exclamation mark next to “Coprocessor” in Device Manager, Download BootCamp 4.0.4033 (later versions do not help with this error). Right click and “Update Drivers” and point it to the BootCamp directory.


9) Windows Update will recommend a chipset update (15.35_nforce_win7_64bit_international_whql.exe). This will offer an SMU update, an ethernet update, and a storage driver update. Only the SMU update works - the other two produce an identical crash.

I’ve tried NVIDIA driver versions 331.82, 335.23, and 340.52. All of them crash during installation (the screen goes black and the system reboots), preventing the driver from installing. Installing from safe mode produces the same boot-up error as the 337.88 driver. I’d be gratefull for any direction.


Cheers,


vrl2

Feb 19, 2015 2:27 PM in response to projectRelentless

This helped me install Windows 8.1 on my MacBook Pro Mid 2009. I appreciate the time you took in writing this. The right click did not work for me for "Run as Administrator" (no option showed up). The registry hack did not work. Is anyone having the same issue? I opened the command prompt with elevated permissions (searched on web), and changed the directory destination to where the bootcamp.msi is located, and ran the file. This installed the above mentioned bootcamp drivers successfully. Thank you!

How to install Windows 8 on Mid 09 Macbook Pro (10.8.3)

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