MPB Early 2011 and Windows 10 working perfect!

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Flash_1977 Author

Level 1

9 points

MPB Early 2011 and Windows 10 working perfect!

Dear All,

I would like to inform you all that I own a MBP E2011 and currently running Windows 10 without any problem. I have my MBP since 2011 and start originally with a Boot Camp Partition with Windows 7 ... after some years it has been upgraded to 8.1 and even windows 10 was working. Recently my HDD got damaged and it seemed there was no way to install Windwos 10 again.

Over the years I have replaced a bad working Optical drive with a hard disk and very recently I purchased a second SSD and installed Windows 10 as a second OS (SSD1: El Capitan; SSD2: Windows 10).

It took me nearly 1 week in solving the whole unnecessary complex method, because I encountered a number of errors by setting up a proper Bootcamp partition;

- because of the missing optical drive, bootcamp needs to be modified to allow you to boot from USB. (I needed to do this because I used a bootable USB drive, but if you have the optical drive working you can

The original Bootcamp In El Capitan can not create a proper partition on the drive (Windows can not be installed due to wrong formatted drive and partition table. Windows 10 requires GPT and this is not performed properly. After fixing this at the end of installing windows 10 an error occurred: Windows can not change the boot configuration " I tried all mentioned issues on forums and nothing worked.

-

So I would like to share my solution to avoid that your productivity is affected in the same way as mine...

- download the original Win10.iso

- download the bootcamp support drivers (I used boot camp assistant for this; you need this because wifi won't work after bootin in windows the first time).

I forgot the whole Bootcamp Assistant program. I put my new SSD in a windows laptop, downloaded the original WIndows 10 ISO and activation key. I made a bootable USB which was containing a EFI bootloader. I installed Windows 10 on the SSD and after completion (before making any personal changes in Windows 10 installation I shut down the laptop and put the SSD in my MBP.

- I booted directly in Windows and finalised the installation and settings of Windows

- I installed the bootcamp drivers (the only driver which did not work was the realtek audio drivers; via taskmanager you can close this and the rest of the drivers will install properly. (audio does work properly).

- After completion I activated my Windows 10

- Everything is working perfect...keyboard, brightness... and startup within around 8 second...

So...in order to avoid a lot of problems with the new Windows on your Mac.. ....try above. I took me more then 35 hours to install everything the official way and to be honest I really can't fond out way this process became so terrible complicated...

Good luck with creating your 'Boot Camp'

MacBook Pro (15-inch Early 2011), OS X El Capitan (10.11.2), 2x SSD

Posted on Jan 11, 2016 1:38 PM

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Answer 1

Kappy

Level 10

361,741 points

Jan 11, 2016 1:42 PM in response to Flash_1977

The purpose of these forums is to helps resolve other users' technical problems. It is not a bulletin board for general announcements. We are happy about your success, but this is not an appropriate venue for it.

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Answer 2

Flash_1977 Author

Level 1

9 points

Jan 11, 2016 2:29 PM in response to Kappy

??

.. So You would rather see people struggling for days in order to get their computer back on track? ... I believe there are MANY people trying to find a solution and if they require help they get in contact with me about details.. I saved you bothering with the loads of errors I encountered with the crappy Bootcamp Assistant.

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Answer 3

Kappy

Level 10

361,741 points

Jan 11, 2016 2:24 PM in response to Flash_1977

Just help others. Don't waste our time with your bragging. We really don't care.

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Answer 4

Jan 22, 2016 5:53 PM in response to Kappy

Some of us do. Mind your own f*** business.

Thanks Flash, I'll give it a try with the SSD on a different computer. Wasted hours already looking for a solution to the dreaded "can't write the boot configuration" nonsense.

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Answer 5

Jan 24, 2016 6:27 PM in response to Flash_1977

I was impressed that this method actually worked, however I made a crucial mistake which led me to having to reinstall using a different method.

The mistake was that I completely cleaned up the disk prior to installing Windows 10 on a different machine. Then I put it back into the Mac. Windows reinstalled all the needed drivers, with some critical exceptions. Multiple entries for graphics cards showed up (Intel HD3000 & ATI) in device manager, and no sound. At best I managed to install the driver for the 3k adapter, but then the whole screen turned black. Everything I tried sound wise was in vain. All these because I've done a pure and clean EFI install of Windows.

So I tried again, following the "standard" approach this time. I let OS X prepare the drive for Windows 7 and up installation, then when booting in non-EFI Win 10 setup I pressed SHIFT-F10 in the "Install" screen. In the command window that popped up I used diskpart to format the win install partition as NTFS and completed the install without a problem. This method is documented in detail in this forum elsewhere.

In my particular case, because I didn't need the OS X, which I normally run from an external drive for situations like this one, I've just deleted the entire Bootcamp partition and expanded the OSX one which I then formatted as NTFS and made it active with diskpart. This is most likely not needed for regular scenarios involving multi booting from the same disk.

I installed Bootcamp 5 downloaded directly from Apple's website, as Win8 drivers are compatible with Win10. Everything works normally. The only thing that I probably miss is the AHCI support for my SSD, blocked on purpose in this scenario. This can be easily checked by looking under ATA controllers section in Device Manager. AS SSD benchmark reports pciide and the transfer speeds are obviously lower. But I'm gonna have to learn to live with that.

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Answer 6

Feb 25, 2016 11:15 AM in response to Flash_1977

Thank you very much for describing how you managed to install Win10 on your dual SSD MBP Flash_1977! I tried everything you tried and your solution worked for me too! Very, very helpful indeed!!

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