Windows 10 on MacBook Pro Mid 2010 13"

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.

After 2 years of running Windows 10 x64 on my mid-2010 13" MacBook Pro 2.4, these are my notes.

I used it extensively for my engineering work, dual-booting with MacOS (which is still supported on this aging computer). High Sierra will likely be the last update for it, and probably the last MacOS I will own because the latest Apple notebooks are not attractive to me at all as this one was.

-Updates are extremely intrusive. In my case, Windows insisted on overwriting the current Nvidia driver with a broken one. It is possible to block this update with an obscure Microsoft utility, but every so often Microsoft will give the new driver a new update ID, so the entire blocking process has to be gone through again. I got around this issue by enabling a group policy to check before updating. However, this policy only worked about 50% of the time.

-The "big" updates are essentially OS upgrades. In my case, it re-enabled all the devices I had disabled in device manager, causing resource conflicts and about a day of downtime. Also, there was a bizarre change for 1607 that reset brightness to 50% at login on the Education editions of Windows 10. You can read about it online.

Unresolved issues on this computer. I could not solve these issues:

-DPC-related stuttering and BSODs. I chased this problem for more than 2 years even back on Windows 8. The problem would manifest itself by random stuttering audio during disk access and occasional BSODs. BSODs were eliminated if OverrideMaxPerf is set like in my tutorial. I never could track it down.

-Strange sound volume issues. Sometimes when switching between speakers and headphones the volume ceiling would change. Temporarily resolved by restarting the Windows Audio Service.

Because of this issues, I have downgraded back to Windows 7. The DPC issues are NOT reproducible. If I have time, I will track down what driver or Windows feature is causing this problem.

The volume issues are also in 7. Again, the latest Nvidia drivers that aren't broken are the 327.23 2013 drivers.

It's interesting, this MacBook has been supported for a very long time by Apple (7 years and counting). I can't see this happening with newer Apple notebooks because of their inability to be upgraded, but who knows. Their inability to be upgraded (and all the other silly issues like dongles) have pushed me away from Apple, unfortunately.

I've heard that one of the introduced features in Windows 8 was dynamic CPU ticks, and this was causing crashes on certain MacBooks. This might be part of the DPC issues I experienced.

More updates:

I was incorrect, Windows 7 x64 is just as broken as Windows 10 on the 2010 13" MacBook Pro with Apple's drivers. On a clean installation of Boot Camp 4 without modifications, these are the issues affecting Windows 7-10 on the mid-2010 MacBook Pro 2.4:

1. Corrupt graphics with the 2011 Nvidia driver.

2. Sound volume ceiling issue.

3. Applications that rely on keyboard language to set shortcuts fail to work (such as Word 2013). This results in no Ctrl-Command (such as Ctrl-C) in these applications.

4. High DPC latency.

5. Judder with the current Firefox video decoder.

6. Complete DPC-related death. No BSOD, just crackled audio to complete freeze. Nothing in event viewer either.

Resolution:

1. Install 327.23 drivers. Resolved.

2. Unresolved. Workaround is running the Audio Restart bat to restart the audio subsystem.

3. Set keyboard region to US from United States (Apple) in text services and input language. Resolved.

4. Unresolved.

5. See 6. Resolved.

6. This was the trickiest one. It seems to be related to various misbehaving drivers. Chief among these was Nvidia's driver failing to switch power states as mentioned in my earlier tutorial. However, it seems to be related to other drivers as well because the freezes still occur with Nvidia's power switching disabled (but less frequently). What probably happens is one driver asks for something less efficiently than ideal, and another driver gets in the way until Windows times out and freezes.

The current workaround is this:

a. Disable the following devices: Apple Bluetooth; IEEE 1394; Apple IR; SD Card Reader; Broadcom Ethernet.

b. Run nForcer for Performance 3D (the registry change automated, along with a few other changes).

c. Advanced tab of Broadcom wireless: disable 802.11a; disable minimum power consumption.

d. Rename applehfs.sys, applemnt.sys, and machaldriver.sys to *.sys.old.

7. Restart.

Obviously, some things will not work. I haven't tested Apple's online updates yet. So far, the system is improved and stable. These fixes also apply to Windows 8 and 10. These freezes don't occur right away, sometimes they take many days of uptime to manifest themselves. I use this computer for applications that require long uptime, so stability is essential for me. I don't know if anyone still uses this MacBook, but if they are here are my results.

Link for fixes zip: https://1drv.ms/u/s!AnoqsEUuNJd4gP5nkYBJC2VI73coWg.

I will update my tutorial to reflect these findings one of these days.

It wont, I upgraded to Windows 10 from Windows 7 Ultimate on my 2010 Macbook Pro and it glitched out and I had to hard reset it. Every time the graphics card was needed, it froze. And then I had to reformat the Bootcamp partition and reinstall Windows 7.

My Windows 7 is running flawlessly. Its actually performing better than the Mac OS partition. I have Steam installed on both my Mac and Windows 7, and games run noticeably smoother on the Windows side.

Just wanted to say thank you for all of the documentation you've provided. I'm about to resurrect one of these old guys and plan to eventually get 10 running; your guide will save me a lot of time! Any chance you can re-host the fixes zip? The link appears to be broken.

It runs perfectly on my Mac Pro 2010. The only thing not working is the front audio connector for some reason.

Not supporting windows 10 is simply another attempt from apple to argue buying a new one.

But why should we do that when our old ones are faster than the latest and most expansive trashcan models?!

They are also undermining the driver support with every OSX version for my 1080ti which blows all other apple options away.

These are really lame tactics from apple and already forced me to leave the apple universe...

Very helpful post. Thanks for posting your findings. ➕