"Infinite Loop" of Problems

"Excellent." Well, it was excellent for a while. But... 36 GB Boot Camp partition was not enough, and also I was dissatisfied with the size of the 128 GB SSD, so I bought and installed a Kingston 480 GB SSD (+ adapter) into the MacBook Air. Since doing that, I have spent an incredible number of attempts (and hours) trying to get the Windows installer to work once more. After many failures trying to get a reasonable split between the Mac OS and Windows partitions, I finally re-installed the (same) Mac OS 10.13.6 High Sierra and the partition was suddenly adjustable. I used the "Divide Equally" button and it worked! Amazing! But, using my 16 GB Kingston USB2 flash drive and a new downloaded ISO image from Microsoft, I can get only to the computer restart on the Windows installer, which sits there like a dead rat, with no activity at all. No LED unless I am on the Mac OS.

"I suspect the Kingston's boot-ability." Not sure to which Kingston device you refer. The Kingston 480 GB NVMe SSD works fine on Mac OS 10.13.6, and the Kingston 16 GB "Traveler" USB 2 drive is the one that successfully ran the Windows 7 Ultimate installer ISO, back when I had the 128 GB OEM SSD in the MacBook Air, with the BootCamp partition set at 36 GB.

The ONLY apps that I have had running on the MacBook Air since all my attempts to install Windows have been Disk Utility, Boot Camp Assistant, and Mac OS 10.13.6 itself. Just recently I re-installed the Mac OS itself, and that seems to have been the "fix" for enabling the variable partitioning of the Boot Camp volume. So my impression is that some file (or files) in the Mac OS software were somehow corrupted, causing the failure to set partition sizes for Boot Camp and the Mac OS.

Now since that is fixed, the symptom looks a lot like there is no USB 2 controller on the USB 2 drive. Is that a Windows software fault, a Boot Camp Assistant fault, a Disk Utility fault (probably not), or a flash drive fault? Or is it an incompatibility between Boot Camp Assistant and Mac OS 10.13.6?

Is there any way to force a start of the Windows 7 Ultimate software independent of the Boot Camp Assistant process? All the files I allegedly need are on this flash drive, but picking that drive as the option at power on (or Restart) gives me only an active screen showing a very dark (but not black) background that goes away only if I shut down the computer with a long hold on the power button.

"The Windows Installer has a USB2 driver. It does not have a USB3 driver. If your flash drive is a USB3 (not a USB2) it will not work." Understood; that's why I bought this Kingston USB2 flash drive. And it did work (once) previously to install Windows 7 Ultimate, using the ISO I have on it now. But now it doesn't work!!!!!

"Try a 32GB SanDisk USB2 flash drive." Just did that. Fry's didn't have a 32 GB USB2 Sandisk flash drive, so I bought a 16 GB USB2 Sandisk "Dial Cruzer" flash drive. The results are exactly the same. The only difference for me is that the Kingston flash drive has an LED monitor which flashes when the drive is active, and the SanDisk does not. So I can't "see" if it's active or not. However, all the copying of Windows files and Boot Camp support files to the new flash drive worked fine, the partitioning went smoothly ("Divide Equally") and the remainder of the Boot Camp Assistant task went through to the restart on the WININSTALL flash drive. The Mac OS obviously "thinks" the WININSTALL flash drive is bootable, since it shows up in the Options window, can be selected, and the MBA does restart on that flash drive, but it does NOTHING! NADA! ZIP!

"I will assume that you are using W7 and the correct BC drivers package. Can you post the listing of the USB disk file structure?" Assumption is correct; I am using W7 and "BootCamp5.1.5640" support software which is the particular revision called out for my 13" mid-2013 MacBook Air (package #5 in the table on Apple's website). But I cannot now do other than tell you the USB file structure is MSDOS FAT 32. That is because I have decided to do a brute-force approach to this problem. At the moment I am using a bootable backup of Mac OS 10.13.6 and its Disk Utility to partition the 480 GB SSD. When that is finished, I will install a new copy of 10.13.6 from a bootable flash drive, so there will be a "clean pristine" MacOS 10.13.6 on the internal SSD. And that partitioning process is taking a lot of time... 30 minutes so far. (The "WD Elements" external 1 TB HDD, which contains the OS and Disk Utility I am using, is quite slow.) So you may not wish to stay tuned for a while.

"If you are using an external disk to boot from and run BCA, it will confuse the process. Under normal circumstances, only a USB2 flash drive is expected as external storage." Nope, I used an external USB flash drive to format my internal SSD and re-install Mac OS 10.13.6. After that, I plugged in the Windows installer USB flash drive (no other external drives connected). And... nothing from the Windows installer. BCA did not work, once again. Although, at least I can still partition the internal SSD properly.

All I found out from my latest experiment is that no MacOS apps were causing the problem, since this MacOS 10.13.6 installation was from "Install MacOS High Sierra.app." and with nothing else at all on my internal SSD. So BCA still took me through partitioning, but once the startup disk was changed and the WININSTALL flash drive became the boot drive, the screen was once again a very dark, but not black, blank.

"Can you post the listing of contents (similar to the image I posted earlier) which shows the contents of the USB?"

Attached. (Note that I am sending this message from my Hackintosh, not my MacBook Air. AND, I had extracted the contents of the Boot Camp folder after the last failure, so it looks different now from when it was last used.)

The attached screenshot of BootCamp.xml was opened by TextEdit. Hopefully this is what you wanted.

I have noticed in High Sierra 10.13.6, both on my MacBook Air and also on my 8th-generation Intel-based Hackintosh, that on boot, immediately after the desktop appears, more often than not the cursor is unresponsive to the trackpad (MBA) or Kensington Expert Mouse (Hackintosh) for a few seconds. I was wondering if that could have an effect on communication between the Windows installer and the Mac. What I mean is, what if the Windows installer powers up and queries the Mac, but the Mac is not ready to respond over the USB connection? Could the flash drive then go silent and unresponsive?

"Your issues with the 'lagginess' are related to when the radio(s) are powered during boot." You lost me there. No "radio(s)" here. I do have a Bose sound system on my Hackintosh, but nothing on the MacBook Air except its internal speakers. I did not use the term "lagginess." "Delay" would be more descriptive of what I see. Cursor doesn't respond for 1-2 seconds, then suddenly does That is a USB connection from the motherboard to the keyboard/mouse on my Hackintosh, but I don't know about the internal connection protocol on the trackpad.

I am still mystified as to why the WININSTALL USB flash drive worked once (on the OEM 128 GB NVMe SSD) but only once, and never again. And never at all on the new 480 GB NVMe SSD. It seems like the WININSTALL flash drive with the ISO installer from Microsoft is just not starting the installer. That should be the "setup.exe" app, right? Is there any way to force that app to run when the Mac OS has selected and restarted on the WININSTALL flash drive?

"The 'delay' is related to the drivers for the internal devices loading." Exactly. I am wondering if the time required for internal devices to load is more than the time the Windows installer can wait. In other words, the installer may expect USB communication with the computer instantaneously upon reboot, and if that doesn't happen, the installer goes dormant.

"Does a Shift+F10 bring up a CMD Window?" Not on my Hackintosh. Do you mean after booting the MacBook Air on the installer? I'll try and check tomorrow.

Before this reply to your message, be aware that once again I have downloaded a fresh copy of the Windows 7 Ultimate ISO package from Microsoft via hardline connection to the Internet, downloaded a fresh copy of BootCamp5.1.5640 support software for the MacBook Air mid-2013 13" computer from the Apple site, and attempted a fresh installation of Windows using a "Divide Equally" choice for the partition sizes, i.e. 240 GB MacOS/240 GB Windows.

"Does a Shift+F10 bring up a CMD Window?" No, nothing happens... since I am using the Sandisk 16 GB USB2 flash drive, there is no LED indicator, but I presume if I had the Kingston in there, I would see no activity as before. Any other ways to get a "CMD window?"

"As a test, can you re-install the old SSD and retry the installer?" I will not do that. Why do you think it might make a difference? I do not want a 128 GB storage device on this MBA. Even if the Windows installation did work, I would decline to keep Windows on it. Not enough space for either OS (plus apps), IMHO.

I am aware of the Other World Computing (OWC) SSD issues. This is what I have:

Kingston Digital SA1000M8/480G A1000 480GB PCIe NVMe M.2 2280 Internal SSD High Performance Solid State Drive.

A review:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/12991/the-kingston-a1000-nvme-ssd-review

Ah, thanks. I got a Disk Utility info / jpg here for my "MBA SSD" disk, and I also tried (maybe successfully) for a similar output for the WININSTALL USB drive on the same MacBook Air. So I uploaded both below FYI.