Windows 10 on MacBook Pro Mid 2010 13"

Great post. I'm assuming you installed win 10 via DVD in optical drive.

My optical drive has gone bad. Found out workaround to install through USB EFI. but in this case while installing the NVIDA 327.28 drives the windows crashes.

Read somewhere that it needs to be installed by BIOS CSM. With a broken optical drive, any suggestions?

sidbidus wrote:

Read somewhere that it needs to be installed by BIOS CSM. With a broken optical drive, any suggestions?

You will need to use Fusion and Winclone as a work around. See this link as a reference.

So i gave rEFIt a try and the still getting the crash on NVIDIA installation. Maybe i didn't use rEFIt correctly.

So i started by installing rEFIt but did not get any boot option on restarting. Found out i need to run enable.sh command for it to work.

After that, with the win10 usb, i got the rEFIt menu but only with os x option.

After that i restarted the mac and pressed the alt key so i got the menu with rEFIt as an option.

On pressing rEFIt option, i got the boot menu, where i installed win10 from the third option. the last option gave me a black screen with blinking hyphen sign. The blinking kept going on for 10-15 mins so i restarted.

Now after installing windows, i get the refit menu on booting mac. so i thought i'll try to install again win10 since i'm getting the refit menu directly. Now the fourth option, without usb tell me no bootable device and with usb inserted, i see the black screen again with - sign.

Any ideas where i have gone wrong?

It seems, winclone is the only option left. But don't feel like spending $30 for it.

can't find the option to edit the previous post. so posting again

On pressing rEFIt option, i got the boot menu, where i installed win10 from the third option. the last option gave me a black screen with blinking hyphen sign. The blinking kept going on for 10-15 mins so i restarted.

Windows must be installed in BIOS mode. EFI Windows will not run on this computer, because Apple's EFI implementation is slightly older than necessary.

Apple's BIOS won't let you boot from a non-Apple optical drive or USB drive that doesn't contain Mac OS because Apple. rEFIt will overcome this and let you boot anything.

Easier than making a VM IMO.

I agree it is easier than VM but i was able to boot from USB by making the disk non hybrid i guess ( mentioned in one of Loner T's post). However the problem with that is win10 crashes on installing NVIDIA drivers.

Haven't tried rEFIt but i'm assuming that it would give similar result.

Right now stuck on the process of directly installing the VM image as a raw disk on the partition. The above link provides instruction on an older version of VM Fusion. Mine is 8 and somehow i'm not able to use the raw disk description files since the file extension is different.

It's crashing on Nvidia installation because you're installing Windows in EFI mode. You have to boot in BIOS mode. There should be two options for the Windows installer, an EFI mode and a BIOS mode. In one of your shots, I see the legacy bootloader.

So i gave this another try.

First, i used rEFIt option as it was already installed. As earlier, when i restarted with usb i got three new options. 2 of them had EFI word in it, the third was boot from HD(it didn't say BIOS). So i used the third option and i got the black screen blinking hyphen for 20 mins and nothing happened.

Then i decided to remove rEFIT and installed rEFInd and on restarting with usb, i got an option which mentioned - Boot Fallback boot loader from USBname. I choose this option, intalled Win10, and on installing NVIDIA Win10 crashed again.

After browing some forums, it seems i had to partition the USB as MBR and not GPT. So i partioned the USB as MBR from mac and created win10 usb using Rufus which mentioned BIOS boot option formating.

Now i am getting the error which is preventing me to install-"Windows cannot be installed to this disk. The selected disk is of the GPT style.". On net, it say it is due to a mismatch between the way the HDD is formatted and the USB format style.

Should I reformat the HDD with MBR. Coz on GUID, with usb formatted in GUID gives me the black screen blinking hyphen problem.

Any help is highly appreciated.

sidbidus wrote:

Now i am getting the error which is preventing me to install-"Windows cannot be installed to this disk. The selected disk is of the GPT style.". On net, it say it is due to a mismatch between the way the HDD is formatted and the USB format style.

Should I reformat the HDD with MBR. Coz on GUID, with usb formatted in GUID gives me the black screen blinking hyphen problem.

You cannot and should not reformat the disk to an MBR, but you need to create a Hybrid MBR, using GPT Fdisk. This 'maps' the underlying GPT to a MBR and mimics a legacy MBR disk, which is required for the BIOS installation to work.

So finally i am able to install Windows 10 on my mid 2010 macbook pro 13" with the NVIDIA drivers working absolutely fine.

I couldn't find much info on converting protective boot to hybrid boot. Also, adding a FAT32 partition didn't change this coz i guess i had changed it earlier to protective. Further, since i was having problem merging partitions, i formatted the HDD, used timemachine backup to restore and partitioned again, it worked fine. I must add that creating more than 2 partitions, 3 actually- MacHD, Bootcamp and Recovery, would not let one install Windows.

Almost forgot, pressing alt key and then selecting rEFIt gave me the option to boot from USB. When rEFIt started without pressing the alt key, it did not have the option to boot from USB.

Many thanks to Apple555 and LonerT, your prompt responses are highly appreciated.

sidbidus wrote:

I couldn't find much info on converting protective boot to hybrid boot.

You can use GPT Fdisk to create the Hybrid MBR from the GPT. Run msinfo32 and check the BIOS mode to verify that it is legacy. Does the Audio work properly in W10? Also check for unknown devices in Windows Device Manager.

Glad to hear it. Keep us updated.

It's possible to have 2 partitions with 1 legacy partition and still boot with the Apple bootloader. At one point I had Snow Leopard, Mavericks, and XP installed.

If you installed the Nvidia drivers successfully, you're booting in legacy mode.

Audio is working fine. The drivers are from Cirrus and NVIDIA and not from Realtek. So no problems there.

I read somewhere that windows install through BIOS booting work work on only primary partition and one can have three primary partitions. I saw that when i made another partition, it did not show as primary when i ran the win installer on the screen where it says where to install windows. I guess in your case since you have 2 os x and 1 windows it works, i might be wrong.

I could not find how to disable IR. I don't see it in device manager and in control panel is does not show any device installed under IR. However my ir remote works fine.

Lastly, the colors seem a tad faded vis-a-vis osx. I did try color calibration but still the colors are not that vibrant especially when playing movies.

Windows doesn't know how to handle the MacBook LCD so the colors look awful. You have to take the color profile from Mac OS and set it as the color profile for the LCD in Windows. It's one of the steps in my tutorial. Color calibration is something different. IIRC it's somewhere here: Library\ColorSync\Profiles\Displays. You're looking for an icc profile.

I just disabled IR because I never use it. It should be somewhere in device manager, especially if it works.

Happy computing.

im running win 10 64 bit on a 2010 13" MBP 4GB ram core 2 duo and a 575GB SSD just perfectly except no backlit keyboard and no trackpad so I use a mouse but there IS a way, I'm working on it now...will post when done. this is not true, the only thing are these two that don't work. BT, WIFI, DVD camera etc etc all work natively in bootcmp and runs great. Win 10 64bit will absolutely run on a 13" MBP.