Macbook Air Boot Camp

[tuzed]

To all the people looking to install Boot Camp on their Air using an external drive, (the only way to do it) after three days of talking to Apple support, I found out that the only way to install the drivers is through a Superdrive. If anyone was hoping to use their own external disk, it would only work for the installation of windows (and even then not all external disk drives work).

The Boot Camp drivers only appear fully on a Superdrive, so you either have to copy it onto your windows partition using another mac, (make sure you copy the whole disk), or buy an external Superdrive.

My advice, buy an external superdrive, install windows, and return it within 14 days. (That is the policy in Canada anyways.)

 

[cathyy]

I read that people can install Windows onto their netbooks through a thumbdrive. I'm guessing you could do the same thing with the MBA too?

 

[ayeying]

I installed it using a external drive from my old desktop. I did not have a superdrive and it installed Vista or XP without any problems. It does have to have an external power supply though. It cannot draw power only via USB.

 

[neilhart]

I think maybe we are getting our terms mixed up. The Windows drivers are on disk 1 of the restore DVD set. You need a DVD drive to read it. Superdrive is an Apple term and is not a universal term... (I'll take heat for that).

Anyway, I took an available loose internal DVD drive (PC IDE type) and used an IDE to USB adapter with external power supply for the DVD drive. I installed XP via the standard BootCamp process and then the Apple supplied drivers from the MBA restore one DVD. This was months ago on a generation one MBA.

Neil.

 

[cathyy]

Oh...opps, my bad. I didn't read the whole post properly. Couldn't you just make an .iso of the CD, transfer it over to the MBA, mount it, and install?

 

[tuzed]

I think maybe we are getting our terms mixed up. The Windows drivers are on disk 1 of the restore DVD set. You need a DVD drive to read it. Superdrive is an Apple term and is not a universal term... (I'll take heat for that).

Anyway, I took an available loose internal DVD drive (PC IDE type) and used an IDE to USB adapter with external power supply for the DVD drive. I installed XP via the standard BootCamp process and then the Apple supplied drivers from the MBA restore one DVD. This was months ago on a generation one MBA.

Neil.

I am not sure whether it was just my drive, but Apple support assured me that I needed a Superdrive.

On a side note, does anyone have their wireless adapter show up before the installation of the boot camp drivers? I am not sure whether I had it show up on my Unibody Macbook, but It was not recognized by windows on my Air.

 

[Brooklyn8]

Having a Super Drive makes the Windows install and set up much easier. I spent a good amount of time and headache trying to install Windows without a super drive and got nowhere. I caved and went to BBY and bought a super drive. The install and set up went smoothly.