Hi Loner T, thanks very much for replying and for the advice. I appreciate you taking the time and bother to answer me and Winclone is a great idea that I was considering but I manage to sort it out myself without purchasing any further software and also not everybody have 2 MacbookPro available so this will provide an alternative way for all the people that are stuck with this ¨Non-System Disk¨ problem.
Loner T wrote:
1. For Macs with built-in Optical drives, BCA sets the NVRAM to boot from it and will not allow external optical drives.
I'm afraid you got this wrong, or half wrong, it may won't allow external optical drive but it will boot from a bootable USB. I have managed to boot on my MacBookPro late 2008 with built in optical drive with a bootable 8 GB USB, windows 7 is been installed on the partition that bootcamp created, no issues at all.
Loner T wrote:
2. Modifying the BC info.plist causes the No bootable device error.
It's not that modifying the BC info.plist causes a bootable device error, what happens is that Bootcamp seems to be uncapable of creating a bootable USB, the message Non-system disk found is simply true because Bootcamp creates crap instead of a bootable USB. What I did at the end was:
I used a computer with Windows 7 or higher (In my case at work)
I used DISKPART utility that comes with windows to make my 8 GB USB bootable, the way you do this is:
Insert the USB on the windows machine
Open the command prompt window
From here I'll write commands on italics and comments on normal
Type diskpart
It will ask you if you want to allow diskpart to make changes on this computer or some similar warning message you need to click yes.
Type list disk
It will show a list with the different disks, THEY WILL BE LISTED AS DISK 0, DISK 1, ETC.. identify your USB and see what number is
Type select disk #
Obviously here you need to change "#" for whatever number your USB is, DON'T GET THE NUMBER WRONG OR YOU'LL BE FORMATTING THE WRONG THING.
Once the disk is selected type clean
That will delete all the partitions and info on the USB
Then type the following chain of commands:
create partition primary
select partition 1
active
format quick fs=fat32
assign
exit
All this will create a primary partition on your USB that will be bootable and will exit DiskPart, after this you only need to copy the files from your windows DVD or iso image into the USB and the bootable USB is ready to be used
Once you got your bootable USB you open bootcamp and untick the create a USB bootable disk and also the download the last software from apple, otherwise bootcamp will format again the USB and will undo all the work that you just did. Now I am assuming here that you already have modified the info.plst file on bootcamp to allow bootcamp to install from USB if you don't know how to do this follow the link on my previous reply to this post.
After that bootcamp will ask you for the size of the partition you want to create, and then it will create it, restart the computer and the computer will boot from USB and the windows instalation program will start.
There is only one hurdle more, the windows installation program will not let you choose the partition that bootcamp did straight away, you need to select it, format it (the option to format it appears once you click disk advanced) and then it will let you choose it and the installation will finish as normal. Remember that after you install windows it will go by default into windows, to come back to Mac hold alt/option at start and choose the mac partition, once in mac open the startup disk utility and select whichever partition(windows or Mac) you prefer to be the default one anytime the computer starts.
That worked for me on a MacBookPro 15' with Yosemite Os X and while installing windows 7, I hope this helps other people but obviously do it under your own resposibility
Cheers Everybody