Q: bootcamp fails to start after upgrade to macOS Sierra

It will save your internal disks from being modified.

I got the idea. I'll try sometime soon. Thanks.

Is there a chance this has screwed up my hard drive? I tried formatting the drive and installing back mavericks from scratch but I just can't get any bootcamp partition to start. After a while I realized it was somehow occupying the diak1s5 volume and deleted the recovery partition but even at disk1s3 it doesn't start. I'm really frustrated.

Since you have two drives, where did you install Mavericks? Can you post the output of diskutil list? Did you install Mavericks on an external disk?

On the second drive, since the first one is a mechanical HD and the second is an SSD.

You know, I managed to install Windows 10 on an external USB 3.0 SSD on my Macbook Pro. The iMac is simply hopeless booting from any bootcamp partition using that SSD.

MBPs and iMacs from different years will behave differently with external W10 installations.

No I'm not even trying to install it on an external drive. It's an SSD that's in place of the superdrive.

The most incredible of it all is that before, I could easily install it and make Windows run flawlessly using the following process:

1) Installing it using a virtual machine

2) Paragon VMDK mounter

3) Winclone

I got it working 3 times (but only on Mavericks). Then I updated and tried the steps I've done here. Couldn't get it to boot. Now, even if I do the same process that worked 3 times before, nothing happens. I can't get it to boot from a second partition. I've tried every single tutorial online. It's so **** frustrating.

Now I'll have to call a technician here so he'll uninstall the original HD, put the SSD there, the superdrive back in and try to make bootcamp work the way it's supposed to.

Is it possible the previous commands somehow screwed up my SSD? Wouldn't a restore erase all the previous changes?

gugalpm wrote:

 

No I'm not even trying to install it on an external drive. It's an SSD that's in place of the superdrive.

 

The most incredible of it all is that before, I could easily install it and make Windows run flawlessly using the following process:

1) Installing it using a virtual machine

2) Paragon VMDK mounter

3) Winclone

 

I got it working 3 times (but only on Mavericks).

Have you tried the same procedure on the 1TB HDD in the Main Bay?

Then I updated and tried the steps I've done here. Couldn't get it to boot. Now, even if I do the same process that worked 3 times before, nothing happens. I can't get it to boot from a second partition. I've tried every single tutorial online. It's so **** frustrating.

Sierra has closed loopholes on unsupported configurations on many Macs.

 

Now I'll have to call a technician here so he'll uninstall the original HD, put the SSD there, the superdrive back in and try to make bootcamp work the way it's supposed to.

This is the supported method.

 

Is it possible the previous commands somehow screwed up my SSD? Wouldn't a restore erase all the previous changes?

If you can still see the SSD, there are no hardware issues. You can erase the SSD and try.

Another option to test is to create Fusion drive between the SSD/HDD and use diskutil cs resizeStack command and partition the designated physical disk to test installing Windows.