Hi. I could not get Brigadier to work for me, so I did some tinkering and I seem to have successfully installed the Apple Drivers on Windows 7 Ultimate, located on its own internal HD, on my Mac Pro (running either High Sierra or Mojave). Can the experts in this forum provide feedback please i.e. in your opinion, have I been successful in installing the drivers? My ultimate goal is to be able to dual boot (not quite there yet with Mojave, see Note #2 below).
What I did:
Note #1: No problems booting back to High Sierra, using Apple’s Bootcamp Control Panel - tried this multiple times, no issues. A caveat: note that the High Sierra HD is formatted with Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and not APFS.
Note #2: For the Mojave HD (which was formatted to APFS when Mojave was installed - not a good idea, according to a recent Rocket Yard blog), since Windows 7 cannot see the APFS drive (the Apple Control Panel only shows my Bootcamp drive) you only get presented with the option to reboot to Windows - in other words you are “stuck”. A temporary fix that I am using is to shut down Windows, restart the Mac Pro using a PRAM reset (OPTION+CMD+P+R), and wait until you hear a second chime. I am looking into BootRunner, Boot Manager and Paragon for possible solutions. I have come across some ideas to change the HD volume from APFS back to Mac OS Extended, but I have some hesitations.
Feedback please:
I think that the Bootcamp drivers are correctly installed, however, do you think I need to do anything else to test besides being able to boot to Windows 7? I provided a bit of extra detail for those not familiar with CMD in Windows, should others decide to try this.
I am using a Mac Pro (4,1->5,1), firmware 144.0.0.0.0., Sapphire Pulse RX580 8Gb VRAM, no bootscreen with Mojave installed. As noted above, I tested with High Sierra, and everything works for a true dual boot. Not quite there yet with Mojave.
The only hardware hiccup is that darn AHCI-PCIe card with a Samsung SSD and Mojave installed - while it is fast, Windows stalls when it boots up and sees the PCIe card. So, at the moment, I am using a fast HDD with Mojave on it, using Start Disk in preferences to get a Windows boot, then going back to Mojave using a PRAM reset.
What I did:
- Obtained Bootcamp 5 from Apple (make sure you have the correct version of Bootcamp 5 for your model - there appear to be 2 versions and the Apple webpage will be helpful for this).
- Within Bootcamp folder, I copied the folder with Apple drivers onto a fat32 USB key (just to keep things simple while using Command and changing directories). Note: I did not copy any other folders from bootcamp to the USB.
- Booted into Windows 7 (note: No problems if I use a HDD with either High Sierra or Mojave - does not work, so far, if a PCIe SSD AHCI card is installed - it has to be pulled out or Windows stalls during boot)
- From Start: ran Search for CMD, did “CTRL+SHIFT+ENTER” to get Administrator privileges.
- Typed “F” (to access USB key located on the F drive; D and E are occupied by 2 optical drives that I have in the cMP, ergo the F drive for the USB key)
- Changed from F root to Apple directory (“CD Apple”).
- Ran the following command: MSIexec. /i bootcampMSI (FYI - bootcampMSI is found within the Apple Drivers folder)
- Bootcamp install app opened, I followed the install instructions, everything seems to have installed from within the Apple Drivers directory (no error messages).
- Typed “reboot” (on first time reboot, windows took a couple of extra minutes to boot up - no errors)
- Found the Apple Control Panel on the Windows screen.
Note #1: No problems booting back to High Sierra, using Apple’s Bootcamp Control Panel - tried this multiple times, no issues. A caveat: note that the High Sierra HD is formatted with Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and not APFS.
Note #2: For the Mojave HD (which was formatted to APFS when Mojave was installed - not a good idea, according to a recent Rocket Yard blog), since Windows 7 cannot see the APFS drive (the Apple Control Panel only shows my Bootcamp drive) you only get presented with the option to reboot to Windows - in other words you are “stuck”. A temporary fix that I am using is to shut down Windows, restart the Mac Pro using a PRAM reset (OPTION+CMD+P+R), and wait until you hear a second chime. I am looking into BootRunner, Boot Manager and Paragon for possible solutions. I have come across some ideas to change the HD volume from APFS back to Mac OS Extended, but I have some hesitations.
Feedback please:
I think that the Bootcamp drivers are correctly installed, however, do you think I need to do anything else to test besides being able to boot to Windows 7? I provided a bit of extra detail for those not familiar with CMD in Windows, should others decide to try this.
I am using a Mac Pro (4,1->5,1), firmware 144.0.0.0.0., Sapphire Pulse RX580 8Gb VRAM, no bootscreen with Mojave installed. As noted above, I tested with High Sierra, and everything works for a true dual boot. Not quite there yet with Mojave.
The only hardware hiccup is that darn AHCI-PCIe card with a Samsung SSD and Mojave installed - while it is fast, Windows stalls when it boots up and sees the PCIe card. So, at the moment, I am using a fast HDD with Mojave on it, using Start Disk in preferences to get a Windows boot, then going back to Mojave using a PRAM reset.