Windows 10 boot camp

When bootcamp drivers installed on windows 8.1 the volumes that HFS+ formatted will be mounted in windows automatically, have read only right, I made the usb windows-to-go on a PC that has windows 8.1 ent, seems now we don't have to avtivate the windows to use it, ignore the watermark, which is good 🙂

Well, re windows 10, I have found a solution, for windows to go, no bootcamp app involved. I boot into windows 10 on the usb, then install HFS+ for windows 8/8.1 from paragon, after reboot my dear mac volumes are all mounted automatically, I have read/write rights, then I extract drivers from the BootCamp5.1.5621 folder and install those drivers through Device Manager, now all drivers are working including bluetooth!

I think the problem is the setup.exe that playing tricks... anyway it was issued for windows 8.1, no surprise. so now I can use my windows-to-go on mac mini too, great! USB 2.0 doesn't slow down it too much 🙂

Yes. BC Assistant is not needed on such machines, but BC Drivers are necessary for Apple HW support. Disks Utility on OS X can be used to create a Free Space partition and used for Windows installation. Here is the GUID partition table from a late 2013 rMBP.

gpt show: /dev/disk0: mediasize=500277790720; sectorsize=512; blocks=977105060

gpt show: /dev/disk0: PMBR at sector 0

gpt show: /dev/disk0: Pri GPT at sector 1

gpt show: /dev/disk0: Sec GPT at sector 977105059

start size index contents

0 1 PMBR

1 1 Pri GPT header

2 32 Pri GPT table

34 6

40 409600 1 GPT part - C12A7328-F81F-11D2-BA4B-00A0C93EC93B

409640 487712920 2 GPT part - 48465300-0000-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC

488122560 1269536 3 GPT part - 426F6F74-0000-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC

489392096 32

489392128 262144 4 GPT part - E3C9E316-0B5C-4DB8-817D-F92DF00215AE

489654272 487450624 5 GPT part - EBD0A0A2-B9E5-4433-87C0-68B6B72699C7

977104896 131

977105027 32 Sec GPT table

977105059 1 Sec GPT header

sudo fdisk /dev/disk0

Disk: /dev/disk0 geometry: 60821/255/63 [977105060 sectors]

Signature: 0xAA55

Starting Ending

#: id cyl hd sec - cyl hd sec [ start - size]

------------------------------------------------------------------------

1: EE 1023 254 63 - 1023 254 63 [ 1 - 977105059] <Unknown ID>

2: 00 0 0 0 - 0 0 0 [ 0 - 0] unused

3: 00 0 0 0 - 0 0 0 [ 0 - 0] unused

4: 00 0 0 0 - 0 0 0 [ 0 - 0] unused

The MSR partition GUID type is GPT4. GPT5 is MS Data. There is no MBR necessary.

Hi Loner,

I am a little confused, I have a Mid-2010 MBP and have managed to install Win10 using UEFI just fine. Is there something in post-2013 Macs that is missing in previous versions, or would they just have some sort of optimisations available?

I must say though, even on my near fossil hardware, UEFI boot time is blazing fast, and definitely makes a good case to drop BootCamp as fast as possible for Dual-Boot.

Regards,

Marc

Full UEFI compliance is available in Late 2013 and later models. Prior models have partial EFI compliance since EFI 1.1 and UEFI are very similar with overlapping areas. If you install on an older Mac, all hardware may not work properly. Windows has also evolved from W7 EFI to W10 EFI, with broader support for legacy systems. W10 has to support some very archaic hardware, including some XP and Vista machines.

You may want to verify if all your devices are fully functional, rather than being partially functional. You should also backup such a state, to avoid Windows Update silently deploying drivers that may not work properly.

Thanks again,

Looks like I met the issues your are talking about, after trying to install BootCamp 5.1 drivers. I know the drivers were not yet officially supported, so when I got a terminal system failure after installing the drivers successfully, I started going one-by-one and doing a system restore between each. Now however that seems a waste of time, if I hit into EFI based issues as you suggest.

So because UEFI is replacing BIOS, and not just a boot record (i.e. MBR), all bets are off with regards to hardware support, and something innocuous like the Keyboard or OSD drivers could cause issues?

Seems like I will have to wait to upgrade or till more stable drivers come out.

Thanks,

Marc

You can remove the current installation and re-install via BCA, which will give you a BIOS installation. Your drivers from BC Assistant will then work.

I have a new 2015 Macbook Pro Retina and would like to try to install a copy of Windows 10 on a separate Thunderbolt hard drive by first booting from a USB stick created by Windows 10. Think this should be possible or should I still attempt to have Boot Camp first create the bootable USB stick or use a Virtual machine (like Parallels) to attempt to install Windows 10 though it?

Been looking around the internet to see what options are available before I attempt anything with Windows 10 on separate Thunderbolt hard drive.