BootCamp Problems on mid-2014 15" Macbook Pro
Hey there guys! I was hoping someone could help me with this weird problem. You see, I've been trying to install Windows 7 x64 Professional via Bootcamp. Here's what I tried:
I tried a SanDisk cruz 3.0 usb flash drive at first and was able to get this to install. However when I booted into windows I was unable to access my flash drive. Now I wish I wouldn't have deleted the partition and moved onto using Parallels, as I could have simply dropped the BootCamp files into the NTFS partition using the paragon drivers I have now. Ah well.
So now I'm wanting to try again with BootCamp so I can boot straight into only Windows 7 when I need to. Here's what I've been trying and where it keeps going wrong:
I have been using the SanDisk Extreme 32GB 3.0 USB flash drive to install Windows and every time I get to the point of formatting the BOOTCAMP partition to NTFS, it does and then tells me that it is unable to create a new system partition or locate one when I click next having selected the newly formatted partition. I've also noticed that whenever I reboot and try the installation again, it drops me into a different Windows installer that attempts to find the drivers upon beginning setup. It can't find the 3.0 flash drive and won't load anything from it. Now I've read that this has something to do with Windows 7 not supporting USB 3.0 during installation. This is not necessarily a problem since if I could only get Windows installed on the BOOTCAMP partition, I would be able to bop the files right onto the partition from Yosemite and then boot back into Windows and go from there. So now I'm stuck in an infinite loop of deleting the partition and then repeating the entire process.
I will say this though, the last time this actually worked, I had to repeat the process maybe 3 times and each time I actually did not use the BootCamp assistant software to delete the newly made partition. I used Disk Utility instead. Now....I'm not sure if there's any correlation there, but it may be something worth trying. I feel that it may have the same result considering that BootCamp Assistant probably uses Disk Utility under the hood whenever it's partitioning and deleting partitions.
With that being said, I was wondering if anybody has solved a similar problem or has dealt with this specifically. I know that there's tons of threads/posts with similar problems but all the solutions I have found have yet to actually work in any way for me. As I said before, I'm stuck in an infinite loop and nothing seems to make this work. Anybody have any ideas? I would appreciate any help as I am so excited to be able to convert this MBP into my All-In-One productivity laptop.
EDIT: I wanted to also add that originally I had tried to install with a windows 7 ISO that I had downloaded via torrent (legally, of course) due to a purchase download link that would have taken around 2 hours. This was the one which worked successfully via the first flash drive. However when I tried it with the second flash drive, it did not work. So I did my time and downloaded the purchased ISO copy and tried that one as well, only to have the same problem. I even went so far as to go on an older windows laptop and format the flash drive, make it bootable with the purchased ISO copy, place the Bootcamp support software on it and try again that way. Again, same problem.
MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2014), OS X Yosemite (10.10.5), null
