Install Windows 7 in Mid-2015 Macbook Pro

Good Afternoon All,


I am trying to install Windows 7 onto a Macbook Pro that bootcamp no longer supports putting Windows 7 onto. I have a Product Key for 7 and want to upgrade to Windows 10 but, unfortunately, Windows 7 has to be on the machine first. I used a friends Macbook Pro early 2011 to create a WININSTALL USB stick using their Bootcamp software (which permits Windows 7 because of his 2011 model) but when I reboot and hold the OPTION key it does not even recognize the stick. The only thing that is there is my Mac HD. Does anyone know of a method to get Windows 7 onto one of the new Macbook Pro's? I have moderate computer skills and can do some things in command line, use Xcode to modify files like bootcamps .plist, etc.


Thank you for your suggestions,

CB

MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2015), OS X Yosemite (10.10.5)

Posted on Sep 7, 2015 9:13 AM

Reply
64 replies

Sep 11, 2015 7:42 AM in response to Loner T

I haven't made it yet so if there is a certain way you recommend I will follow that. But my plan is to use my friends 2011 Macbook Pro. I was going to use Bootcamp to download drivers to a USB and then have it make a Bootcamp partition and use the Windows 7 64 bit install disk I have since his 2011 has an optical drive. After installing all the updates to Windows 7 I was going to:

1.) Run sysprep /generalize /oobe

2.) At boot-up use a CloneZilla Live on USB thumb drive to make a clone of the Bootcamp partition on 2011 Macbook Pro

3.) Use CloneZilla Live on USB thumb drive to copy clone to FAT partition on 2015 Macbook Pro

Sep 11, 2015 8:29 AM in response to Loner T

I was going to buy WinClone Standard just to make things easy but I was reading their support documents and it looks like cloning isn't going to work either on a 2015 macbook Pro if the image comes from a 2011 Macbook Pro. Do you think I am reading the link below correctly?


https://twocanoes.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/204433039-Winclone-Image-Compati bility-with-512b-and-4K-Block-Size-on-20


Sep 11, 2015 8:55 AM in response to Loner T

https://twocanoes.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/204433039-Winclone-Image-Compati bility-with-512b-and-4K-Block-Size-on-20



The weird thing is I have a 2015 Macbook Pro and when I ran the command they did in the article mine shows:


MacBook-Pro-2:~ cb$ diskutil info / | grep "Block Size"

Device Block Size: 512 Bytes

Allocation Block Size: 4096 Bytes


So maybe it would still work?

Sep 11, 2015 9:04 AM in response to Taelvin

Run the Highlighted commands shown in the link on the 2011 MBP.


Additional information can be found by starting Boot Camp and view sector info with

fsutil
. Running Windows 8.1 on a pre-2015 MacBook Pro and 2015 MacBook, we find the bytes per sector (device block size) differences as well as master file table (MFT) size shown by bytes per file record segment differences.

pre-2015_MacBootCamp> fsutil fsinfo ntfsinfo c:

Bytes Per Sector : 512

Bytes Per Physical Sector : 4096

Bytes Per Cluster : 4096

Bytes Per FileRecord Segment : 1024

Clusters Per FileRecord Segment : 0


2015_MacBootCamp> fsutil fsinfo ntfsinfo c:

Bytes Per Sector : 4096

Bytes Per Physical Sector : 4096

Bytes Per Cluster : 4096

Bytes Per FileRecord Segment : 4096

Clusters Per FileRecord Segment : 1

Sep 12, 2015 3:32 PM in response to Loner T

I successfully followed Winclone's guides for migrating a Bootcamp partition and brought the Windows 7 64 bit Partition from my 2011 Macbook Pro to the 2015 Macbook Pro. Since Windows 7 doesn't support EFI booting though I used Parallels to boot into the bootcamp partition, activated Windows 7, then upgraded to Windows 10 using the Windows 10 Upgrade tool. I booted back into MacOS and noticed even with Windows 10 installed on the partition it wouldn't show Windows on the ALT/Option menu. So I selected the bootcamp partition in Winclone and used the "Make EFI bootable" tool. After that I rebooted and in the ALT/Option menu is "Windows" now and "Mac OS." But when I click on the "Windows" partition it switches to a black screen. I waited for ten minutes and finally hit a key and it booted back into the OS X partition. I thought maybe it was a display driver thing so I installed the bootcamp drivers using Parallels to get back into the bootcamp partition. I'm at a loss to know whats going on now....

Sep 12, 2015 5:34 PM in response to Taelvin

When you make Windows EFI bootable, there should be an MSR pointing to the NTFS Bootloader or there should be information in the EFI partition for Windows to boot. Please see Can't resize Macintosh HD partition for the EFI-related Microsoft parts. Please check if you have any Microsoft parts in the EFI partition by mounting it manually and looking at the directory structure as discussed in the link.

Sep 12, 2015 10:05 PM in response to Loner T

i will follow this thread closely, as i've already tried many times to install w7 in my mid 2015 macbookpro with no success, the way I thought it could work was with a WININSTALL usb generated by a previous macbookpro version,but as i've read that doesnt work either im not asking my friend to create a bootable win7 usb for me 😝.. hopefully someone can shed light on this discussion

Sep 13, 2015 8:14 AM in response to Loner T

I felt like the issue had something to do with the hybrid MBR we created so I wiped and re-partitioned the disk and re-installed Mac OS X. Then I created a FAT partition with disk utility as it instructs in the Winclone guides. I put my saved image back on and of course the Windows 10 wasn't activated any longer because of a hardware change. So I put the image of Windows 7 right before upgrading to Win 10 back on the BOOTCAMP partition and re-upgraded (using Parallels to access the Win7 bootcamp partition) from Windows 7 (activated) to Win 10 (activated). After the upgrade I selected System Prefences-->Startup Disk and it has windows so I selected it and hit restart and it successfully restarted NOT into a black screen but instead a blue screen lol.


User uploaded file


Of course, none of the start-up options (F8) make it boot-up either.

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Install Windows 7 in Mid-2015 Macbook Pro

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