Q: Can't install windows 8.1 on early 2011 MBP
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Apr 22, 2015 4:19 PMby Loner T,1. Do you have an external Optical drive? If you already have a partition on the designated drive, remove the other internal drive and test with an external Optical drive.
2. BCA sets the boot arguments to the internal Optical drive based on your Mac's Model Identifier. There is not much you can do to alter such behavior.
3. You can use http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?p=20584499#post20584499 as an option.
4. If possible, you can install/replace your internal Optibay with an Optical drive, and put the designated Windows drive in the main bay.
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Apr 22, 2015 4:52 PMby jared.hendrickson,I don't have an external currently. So if I'm understanding properly you are saying to remove the internal hard drive I installed in place of my SuperDrive?
Actually the reason I'm being so stubborn is due to the fact that I don't want to have to remove one of my drives I have installed. I hava a small SSD that is the boot disk, with the other drive housing my home folder, music, pics, etc. That's the drive I partitioned to use Windows with.
I've stumbled across that MacRumors discussion before, and a few others like it as well. I'm not sure I tried this exact method yet so I will later tonight.
I'm glad this post caught your eye. I've read a lot of different posts you've been a main contributor in.
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Apr 23, 2015 10:36 AMby jared.hendrickson,I ended up coming across this last night:
http://malwaretips.com/threads/installing-windows-on-a-mac-with-a-damaged-superd rive.32474/
I am in the process of testing this out, but currently I'm stuck with an issue with winclone not expanding the image of the usb install disk to use all the space in the partition. However I did boot into the Windows installer and didn't run into the "couldn't find partition" , "no bootable disk", or "not an MBR" errors I've seen before.
I Think the key for non supported hardware and Windows 8 or later is to create the bootable usb in windows and not through BCA. I actually used the VMWare Fusion trial and a windows 10 technical demo image to do the monkeying around in windows. Hope this helps someone else. I'll keep updating.
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Apr 23, 2015 11:42 PMby jared.hendrickson,The method I posted above ended up working, I just had to upgrade to Winclone 5 to make it resize the drive properly. Windows installed easily after that.
Loner T, I've seen you mention somewhere else to put a bootable install on an internal partition. That's pretty much what I ended up doing, but using refind as the boot loader.
