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

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Mar 18, 2013 1:14 PM

projectRelentless thank you for taking you time to do this and help all of us loyal Apple users. I was able to install Windows 8 on my MacBook (Late 2009) by following you instructions last night. Since the BC 4 drivers would not install I skipped the step and went on to BC 5 drivers. It seems to be working okay on everything. If its working is there any reason why I should go back and install the other package and then install the 5 again?


Thanks again! Much appreciated!

187 replies

Jul 1, 2015 5:59 AM in response to dragvra

Since this thread helped me, I figured I'd share that this process works with Windows 10 as well. I just loaded bootcamp 5.0.5033 with an elevated command prompt after 10 loaded (did not use script as it did not work for me), then like they said at the beginning of this thread, go into device manager after reboot and point all "exclamation point issues" to the bootcamp 4 driver set and everything works perfect. To be clear, you do not need "Add_MSI_run_as_administrator.reg" to install bootcamp 5 drivers.


Also, if you load the Windows 10 insider preview (which is free) and register that you're in the insider program, you'll be able to download a free copy of the Windows 10 release on July 29th

Nov 14, 2015 8:37 AM in response to projectRelentless

Sometimes this RegEdit doesn't work and does not allow you to run BootCamp.msi as administrator. If you run into this problem like I did don't bother doing the RegEdit just Go to START->Right Click->Command Prompt (Admin) now navigate to where the BootCamp.msi file is by using cd command. once you get to C:\........\Bootcamp5.0.5033\BootCamp\Drivers\Apple at the prompt type: START BootCamp.msi and you are ready to go. Thank you everyone for adding to this. I could never have done it without all your help

Jun 11, 2013 9:45 PM in response to antswork

This is great! I'm so glad to see a community come together like this. projectRelentless -- i wish you the best of luck and thanks for getting this kickstarted! (It does get easier when you break up - Neil Sedaka had it right though.)


antswork has it right... just run the 5.0.5.033: unzip it (c:\BC would be nice and short) and then from an elevated Command Prompt navigate to c:\BC\BootCamp\Drivers\Apple then type msiexec /a bootcamp.msi and it'll install just fine. According to devmgmt.msc (run from Command Prompt) the only thing i was missing was the Coprocessor driver -- which i was able to extract from the earlier BootCamp4.0.4033.zip under \BootCamp\Drivers\Nvidia\NvidiaChipset64. Right click on Coprocessor in Device Manager and update the driver. Direct Windows to the folder on the desktop for (v4.0.4033 driver) \Drivers\NVidia\NVidiaChipset64 (or 32 if you are running x86). Awesome!

Nov 2, 2013 6:51 AM in response to projectRelentless

Did this perfectly on my Macbook Pro (Early 2008) macbookpro4,1 with Windows 8 Pro. I omitted BootCamp v4 altogether and have no issues with everything running ok, no issues with CPU drivers either.

I've since updated to Windows 8.1. The only issue I had was that I had to burn DVD's for both Windows 7 and 8 as the USB sticks were not recognised. I assume this to be because this is not supported on my older model.

Thank you so much for your instructions.

Mar 18, 2014 2:13 AM in response to projectRelentless

Hi!

I've never gotton the registry entry to enable the "run as administrator" prompt but I have found using the command prompt as a administrator and navigating to and running the bootcamp.msi for bootcamp 5.0.5033 worked just fine. This is all after installing and restarting after bootcamp 4.0.4033 normally.


Thought I'd share incase anyone else couldn't get the registry entry to work out.


KCCO!


P.S Running a macbook pro 13" mid 2009 model with Mavericks and now windows 8!

Oct 23, 2015 10:07 AM in response to projectRelentless

Hi,

I just did the procces on a MacBook Pro 13' Mid 2009, and confirm it Works pretty well, in order to have all drivers installed i did:


1.- Use Windows 10 driver search for Nvida Driver and works flawlessly

2.- Use bootcamp 4.0.4033 drivers for cooproccesor of Nvidia

3.- Install with elevated command prompt bootcamp msi within folder Dirvers on bootcamp 5.0.5033 to install Built in iSight

4.- Install Trackpad++ and power management required to it


Hope it helps others


Cheers

Apr 9, 2013 12:54 PM in response to projectRelentless

Instead of doing the first 14 steps, you can also just delete the entry of "Win7OnlyModels" in info.plist in the packet content of BootCamp.

Then you can just create a usb and/or install windows 8 like it is Windows 7 or older 🙂 You won't get a error that your mac doesn't support windows 8.


I was just testing this because I could not get the usb support (on a MB pro) to work and with this I can. And I am replying now from windows 8 ..

Jun 1, 2013 6:38 AM in response to projectRelentless

Thanks for the thread projectRelentless,

My problem was almost the same with my macbook pro 13in mid 2012 osx 10.8.3 bootcamp 5.0.2.... I installed the windows 8 first because I thought that I could use windows support downloaded from my macpro 10.7.3 using bootcamp 4.0.4 but when I tried to run the bootcamp support it says it does not support my macbook pro, so I re-run bootcamp 5.0.2 from my macbook and tried to download the WindowsSupport file and as what you have mentioned I encountered same error saying my mac supports only windows 7 but then I ignored it and proceed to download the support for windows 7 and took up almost 2 hours before I decided to cancel the download because it seems its not moving anymore ....after reading more threads I came up with just downloading directly the file bootcamp 5.0.5.033 from http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1638?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US and run it succesfully. this solved my problem.


My conclussion:

Just download the 5.0.5.033

Use wired mouse to enable right click option to run as admin


by the way my macpro with osx 10.7.3 has a bootcamp 4.0.4 running windows 8 and did not have any issue with the installation using a multiple bit ISO windows 8 installer but my macbook pro won't recognise it as a 64 bit OS so I needed to burn another installer with a single platform (64bit only).

Nov 10, 2013 8:41 AM in response to M4rbin

For those that had the same issue as myself...


Edit: to explain the issue after many pages of thread.

Following initial suggestion I was able to install everything on my iMac late 2009 and Windows 8.1

I was just missing screen brightness control.


I actually solved all my issues by following the article in this blog:


http://catch404.net/2013/07/brightness-unchangeable-in-windows-8-on-a-macbook-wi th-nvidia/


Basically there is to add a key in the registry to enable brightness on the nvidia card.


So at last I have everything working on 8.1, and I'm not forced anymore to 100% brightness!


Thanks everyone for all the suggestions!

Apr 16, 2014 3:29 AM in response to aplet

aplet wrote:


There is a much easier way of installing Windows 8. Just open Finder>Applications>Utilities> right click on Bootcamp> Show package contents> Contents> Info.plist

Right click and Get info on Info.plist and click the lock at the bottom of the info page and enter your password.

then click the plus to the left of the unlocked lock and add yourself. give yourself read & write permissions.

then open Info.plist

Scroll to the bottom and find the <key>Win7OnlyModels</key>

Then delete the whole line <string>MacbookPro5,5</string>

You might be promted to make a duplicate, just click OK and save it to the desktop. then close it.

Open Boot Camp and it should say "Install Windows 7 or a later version"

Vuela! much easier and legit 😉



Also as a side note if you ever wanted to change the PreUSBSupportModels you can add your model and then you can make a bootable USB drive from an .iso file on your Mac.


User uploaded file
i am using 2009 imac and when i delete the imac string in win7only this is what happens ^^

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

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