Installing Boot Camp drivers is essential for using a Touch Bar and Force Touch with Windows 10 on a Mac, amongst other actions and features. Switching Between MacOS and Windows. Boot Camp allows you to choose the operating system you want to boot up to use during system start, selecting either Windows or Mac OS as desired.
- Boot Camp Assistant Cannot Be Used. This Mac Does Not Support Boot Camp
- Bootcamp Download Could Not Continue
- Boot Camp Not Partitioning
- Boot Camp Internal Error
Installing Windows on a Mac should be a piece of cake with Bootcamp, but thatrarely is the case. In fact, I would personally say that Boot Camp Assistantis one of the worst apps that comes with OS X and unlike the rest, it doesn’twork seamlessly.
That being said it is very odd that Boot Camp requires the use of USB Is there any chance that you might have tried to trick boot camp assistant by editing a file that makes it think it's on a newer computer e.g your computer is a 2010 model but boot camp thinks it's a 2013 model. Or any other modification to try remedy a different problem? Apr 10, 2017. Boot Camp is designed to allow Mac users to set up a partition to run Windows, providing access to PC-only apps and content. Apple's Boot Camp update for macOS 10.14.5 comes about a month after. Use Disk Utility to repair your startup disk. If Disk Utility found no errors or repaired all errors, try again to use Boot Camp Assistant to install Windows. If Boot Camp Assistant still gives the partitioning error, continue to the steps below.
A few of its drawbacks:
- It only supports a drive with a single partition.
- It often throws very obscure error messages with limited detail.
- It re-downloads 1.6 GB Windows drivers every single time it runs. These areplaced under
/Library/Application Support/BootCamp/WindowsSupport.dmg
anddeleted and re-downloaded each time Boot Camp Assistant starts processing.
This post did take a lot of work to complie and I did bone my hard drive afew times while trying certain ideas, so please throw out a thanks if ithelped you out :)
Disclaimer: This guide below contains procedures which can potentiallydestroy your partitions and data. I accept no responsibility for such loss soplease proceed at your own risk.
Update (2016-07-20): I have updated this post with further improvementsrelating to downloading of Boot Camp drivers and ensuring that a Hybrid MBR isnot used (which would cause issues when installing Windows).
- An 8 GB or larger USB stick
- A copy of the Windows 10 ISO
- A valid Windows 10 license
- A downloaded copy of unetbootin
- Start Boot Camp Assistant
- Select Action / Download Windows Support Software
- Choose your Downloads directory, enter your password and then clickSave
This will be the only step that we will use Boot Camp Assistant for.
Formatting Your USB Stick
Attach your USB stick and start Disk Utility, select your USB drive in theleft panel under External, click Erase and set the options as follows(exactly) and click Erase:
Name: FAT32
Format: MS-DOS (FAT)
Scheme: Master Boot Record
Format: MS-DOS (FAT)
Scheme: Master Boot Record
Turning Your USB Stick into a Windows Installer
Open unetbootin, enter your password, set the options as follows andclick OK:
![Boot Camp Assistant Cannot Be Used Boot Camp Assistant Cannot Be Used](https://www.imentality.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Boot-camp-assistant.jpg)
Diskimage: checked, set to ISO and browse to your Windows 10 ISO
Type: USB Drive
Drive: Your USB drive (you should only see one entry here)
Type: USB Drive
Drive: Your USB drive (you should only see one entry here)
If you see more than one drive listed, you may confirm which is your USB driveby opening the Terminal and typing:
You’ll see your USB drive in the output and it should look something like this:
Once you have kicked off unetbootin, grab a snack while the Windows ISO iscopied to the USB stick. This process takes around 15 minutes to complete.
Finishing Up
When this has completed, you may right click on the USB stick in Finder,select Rename “FAT32” and rename it as you like (I’ll call mine“WINDOWS 10”).
Finally, copy the WindowsSupport in your Downloads directory tothe Windows 10 USB stick so it’s easy to get to after our installation.
In Disk Utility, select your internal hard drive on the left panel, andclick on Partition.
Click the + button and create a new partition of your desired size for yourWindows installation and name it as you wish (I’ll call mine “BOOTCAMP”). Ensure that the Format is set to MS-DOS (FAT) and click on Apply.
Huge thanks to Rod’s post from the superuser post titledWindows detects GPT disk as MBR in EFI boot.
Once you add a FAT32 partition with either Boot Camp Assistant or Disk Utility,your disk is converted into a hybrid GPT / MBR disk which is actually notsupported by newer versions of Windows. In this step, we revert thisadditional change made by Disk Utility by switching back to a pure GPTpartition table.
- Dowload the latest version ofGPT fdiskby browsing to the version, then gdisk-binaries and clicking the filewith the *.pkg extension (e.g. gdisk-1.0.1.pkg).
- Install GPT fdisk by running the installer you downloaded
- Open a Terminal and check the state of your MBRIf your MBR partition is set to hybrid, please continue with step 4,otherwise if it is set to protective, you may skip the rest of thissection. Simply type q and hit return to exit GPT fdisk.
- Type p to view the existing partition table and verify you’re workingon the correct disk
- Type x to enter the expert menu
- Type n to create a fresh protective MBR
- Type w to save your changes and confirm the change when asked
- Type q to exit GPT fdisk
- Run GPT fdisk to show your disk layout:Your partition table should look something like this:
Disconnecting All Devices From USB Ports
This step is critical as I have had rather serious problems during Windowsinstallation when certain external drives are connected.
Unplug everything from your Mac except your keyboard (if wired) and yourbootable Windows USB stick (which we prepared earlier).
If your Mac contains multiple physical drives, you will need to disconnectall disks except the one which you intend to install Windows on or you mayencounter the following error:
Windows could not prepare the computer to boot into the next phase of installation. To install Windows, restart the installation.
Booting From the USB Stick
Ensure that the USB stick containing the Windows installer is inserted andthen restart your Mac while holding down the option (alt) key.
You should now be presented with a list of bootable drives. Select the USBdrive (usually titled “EFI Boot”) to begin installing Windows.
Correcting Your Windows Hard Disk Partition
When you are asked Where do you want to install Windows?, select theWindows partition created earlier (which I called “BOOTCAMP”) and clickDelete.
Next, select the chunk of Unallocated Space and click on New to createa proper Windows NTFS partition.
Note: OS X only supports creation of FAT filesystems, so this is why we needto re-create the partition ourselves during install.
Completing the Installation
Boot Camp Assistant Cannot Be Used. This Mac Does Not Support Boot Camp
Allow the installer to complete and boot into Windows.
Installing Boot Camp Support Software
Once Windows is up and running, install the Boot Camp Support software runningWindowsSupport/BootCamp/Setup.exe on your USB stick.
Note: The installer takes a little while to show up, so please be patient.
You may encounter a known issue whereby the Boot Camp Support Softwareinstaller locks up while installing Realtek audio.
Bootcamp Download Could Not Continue
If this occurs, you will need to open Task Manager and kill theRealtekSetup.exe process.
After the installer has completed, answer No when prompted to rebootand install the Realtek drivers manually by running%USERPROFILE%AppDataLocalTempRarSFX0BootCampDriversRealTekRealtekSetup.exe.If you can’t find this file, check any other directories starting withRARSFX under %USERPROFILE%AppDataLocalTemp.
Once complete, reboot Windows.
- The latest version of SharpKeys
- The flipflop-windows-sheel binary (see README for a download link)
Mapping Your Mac Keyboard
Install and run SharpKeys and then configure the following mappings tocorrect your Mac keyboard so that it behaves like a regular Windows keyboard:
Function: F13 -> Special: PrtSc
Special: Left Alt => Special: Left Windows
Special: Left Windows => Special: Left Alt
Special: Right Alt => Special: Right Windows
Special: Right Windows => Special: Right Alt
Special: Left Alt => Special: Left Windows
Special: Left Windows => Special: Left Alt
Special: Right Alt => Special: Right Windows
Special: Right Windows => Special: Right Alt
Note: for F13, you’ll need to select Press a key and click F13 on yourkeyboard.
Switching to Natural Scrolling
Boot Camp Not Partitioning
If you wish to flip scrolling direction to match that on OS X, runFlipWheel.exe and then click on Flip All. Keynote template design 1 7 download free.
Enabling Num Lock on Boot
Paste the following into a file named Enable NumLock on Boot.reg thenimport this into the registry to enable NumLock when Windows boots up(it doesn’t by default).
Completing Configuration
That’s it, give your machine one last reboot and you’ll have a fully workingWindows 10 installation.
Note: I have found Apple’s Magic Mouse to be extremely unreliable usingthe Boot Camp drivers from Apple. As such, I recommend purchasing a Logitech(or similar) mouse for use in Windows. I have no trouble plugging thewireless receiver for my Logitech mouse into one of the USB ports of my wiredApple Keyboard and it’s so tiny that you can’t see it at all.
Boot Camp Internal Error
Removing the Windows Partitions
If you decide to remove Windows, you may find that Disk Utility doesn’t allowyou to delete the two partitions that have been created by the Windowsinstaller.
This happens due to the fact that the first small partition created is of atype called Microsoft Reserved which OS X’s Disk Utility doesn’t support.
The safest way to delete these partitions is through the Windows installer. Sosimply boot from your USB stick as we did before and when you reach theWhere do you want to install Windows? question, you may delete your“BOOTCAMP” partition and the small 16 MB partition of type MSR (Reserved)just above the BOOTCAMP partition.
Once done, simply quit the installer by clicking the X in the top right cornerof each Window and reboot back into OS X.
Removing the Boot Entry
Even though we have removed the Windows partition, a boot entry will still bepresent when holding down option (alt) during boot.
You may remove these items by running the following in your Terminal:
NOTE: THIS UTILITY SHOULD NO LONGER BE NEEDED DUE TO APPLE UPDATING BOOT CAMP ASSISTANT TO USE EXFAT. WE HAVE LEFT THIS ARTICLE AND THE DOWNLOAD FOR HISTORICAL PURPOSES. IT IS NO LONGER SUPPORTED.
In the last few months, people installing Windows on their Macs with Boot Camp Assistant havestartedseeingthe message “An Error occurred while copying the Windows installation files” when using some Windows 10 ISO downloaded from Microsoft. I have seen it a lot since I do testing with ISO of Windows Enterprise downloaded from Microsoft that have been showing this problem. It didn’t seem to happen with all ISO so I investigated the issue, filed a bug with Apple, and figured out a workaround to the problem.
The Cause
When Windows 10 is installed with Boot Camp Assistant, Boot Camp Assistant prepares the disk for installation. To do this, it does the following operations:
- Download the Windows Support software from Apple for the current Mac.
- Creates 2 partitions, one where Windows will be installed (“BOOTCAMP”) and one where the installer files will reside (“OSXRESERVED”). Both are formatted as FAT32.
- Copies all the files from the ISO that was specified at the start of the process by the user to the OSXRESERVED partition. This is where the error happens.
- Copies the files from the WindowsSupport to the OSXRESERVED partition. These files provide both the drivers needed when installing and the drivers that are installed post-install.
- Sets the boot disk to the OSXRESERVED partition and reboots.
Windows boots from the OSXRESERVED and shows the available editions of Windows from the install.wim file in the support folder on OSXRESERVED. This is a large file (usually around 4 GB). The install.wim contains all of the files for a vanilla copy of Windows 10, and is the largest file in the installer ISO.
So here is where the problem resides: FAT32 cannot handle files greater than 4 GB. Each new version of Windows increases the size of this file, and ISOs that contain more editions of Windows can be larger than other ISOs that contain less editions.
In step 3 above, the error message “An Error occurred while copying the Windows installation files” is shown because Boot Camp assistant cannot copy the install.wim to a FAT32 filesystem. This file is required, so the whole process aborts.
To make matters even worse, the disk in the Mac is left in a state where it is difficult to revert back to a single partition. The OSXRESERVED partition is hidden and unmounted, and Boot Camp Assistant cannot restore a disk that has multiple FAT32 partitions.
The Solution
To resolve this issue, both FAT32 partitions need to be removed from the disk and a new ISO must be created where no single file is larger than 4GB. We have created a free utility called “Boot Camp ISO Converted” that copies all the files in the ISO to a folder, splits up the install.wim into parts no larger than 2GB, and creates a new ISO that can be used with Boot Camp Assistant. Here is a step-by-step instructions:
Removing the installer partitions
- Make sure you have a good backup of all files on the disk that could be lost, including all the Mac files. Repartitioning could fail due to drive errors, so having a good backup is important.
- Open Disk Utility, select the startup disk, and click the partition button.
- Select the OSXRESERVED partition and click the “-” button to remove the partition.
- Select the BOOTCAMP partition and click the “-” button to remove the partition.
- Click Apply to start the partition removal process.
Splitting the ISO
- Download Boot Camp ISO Converter (https://twocanoes-software-updates.s3.amazonaws.com/Boot%20Camp%20ISO%20Converter1_6.dmg) and install.
- Open Boot Camp ISO Converter and select the ISO that caused the error.
- Click Save… and specify a name and location for the new ISO.
- After the operation is completed, the new ISO can be used to install Windows with Boot Camp assistant following the standard process.
Boot Camp ISO Converter
Boot Camp ISO Converter uses a command like tool called “wimsplit” to split the wim into parts no larger than 2GB. The WIM format supports split files and when installing Windows, the Windows installer recognizes the split files as treats them as a single large file as long as all the split files are in the same folder. If you look in the sources folder on the new ISO, you will see multiple install.swm files with a number appended on the end.
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