Win10 Head-scratcher or is it the Mac?

[CrazyNurse]

Recently updated cMP to sierra and wanted to load windows over a corrupted boot camp/Win7 drive. I downloaded the Win10 ISO and was able to burn it to dvd. *using the academic 64-bit version.

The USB option is not available to me in Boot Camp. No problem-I'll just boot off dvd. BCA seems to recognize the dvd because if it's not in the drive it won't let me proceed to formatting the destination drive. (It will give a missing win installer message). After formatting it reboots and that's where I'm stuck.

What I've checked:
1.) Downloaded the ISO twice to verify and they're the same size (3.91 GB).
2.) Reset PRAM and SMC
3.) Verified/repaired all drives
4.) macOS up to date
5.) firmware up to date
6.) Tried "C", "option", and "option-command-shift-del" combos multiple times on boot
7.) set startup disk to optical drive
8.) tried 2 different Win7 full install DVDs - won't boot either

The windows disc icon does show up on boot screen but it's useless. After selecting it goes blank screen and just sits there and dvd spins down. Nothing happens and I have to reboot with "option" to OS X boot drive. It just doesn't want to boot off the optical drive. So, I can't install Win7 or Win10 anymore?!?

 

[gonnok]

Recently updated cMP to sierra and wanted to load windows over a corrupted boot camp/Win7 drive. I downloaded the Win10 ISO and was able to burn it to dvd. *using the academic 64-bit version.

The USB option is not available to me in Boot Camp. No problem-I'll just boot off dvd. BCA seems to recognize the dvd because if it's not in the drive it won't let me proceed to formatting the destination drive. (It will give a missing win installer message). After formatting it reboots and that's where I'm stuck.

Hey,

I've just installed W10 around an hour ago on to my cMP 5.1
I had a bootable USB drive created earlier with a rMBP, but DVD is fine as well. You need BCA only to download and write the installers on a USB drive (I've used the same).
Then I've simply alt-booted, choose the W10 installer, and went trough the process. You can format the desired drive in the installer for NTFS. BootCamp drivers will install automatically if you thumb drive is connected.

 

[JedNZ]

I had major problems a while back installing Win10 Pro. It was mentioned in a few places that you have to remove any HFS+ drives - just have Windows formatted drives plugged in. Of course I didn't believe this could be a problem, but finally I paid attention to this step, and woe and behold it finally worked.

As a side note, I strongly recommend Paragon's Hard Disk Manager software. It can copy your Windows boot disk to another partition along with the boot partitions, very handy if you want to transfer to another drive or just to make a backup.

 

[Theophany]

I had major problems a while back installing Win10 Pro. It was mentioned in a few places that you have to remove any HFS+ drives - just have Windows formatted drives plugged in. Of course I didn't believe this could be a problem, but finally I paid attention to this step, and woe and behold it finally worked.

As a side note, I strongly recommend Paragon's Hard Disk Manager software. It can copy your Windows boot disk to another partition along with the boot partitions, very handy if you want to transfer to another drive or just to make a backup.

This is a good tip. Every time I try to install Windows with Boot Camp on a Mac with external hard drives I end up wasting an hour later on restoring from Time Machine because Windows lunched all other installed OSes and took a dump on the boot configuration.

 

[CrazyNurse]

Ay ay ay. I'm going to unplug mechanical drives in bays 1-4 and try it. My OS X is on 1 SSD and Boot camp destination is on another SSD. I hope the OS X SSD doesn't still trip it up.

Totally having PTSD flashbacks of by Wintel days. Haha.

 

[thornslack]

You'll want to pull that OS X ssd as well.

 

[gonnok]

For some reason i had only problem with entering the boot selection menu at startup. Might be because I was trying with the BT keyboard, but once I got it, i had a smooth install with all the HFS drive in the system.

 

[CrazyNurse]

Wow, you guys were right about the HFS drives. I had to unplug every drive including by OS X SSD. Even then, I also had to completely pull my Apricorn Solo and my Orico USB 3 cards. PITA.

At least I got to go in and blow out all the dust bunnies!

It finally went through the install process and seems to be stable.

 

[JedNZ]

Make sure you back it up. I've got my Win10 SSD backed up onto a HDD so if it chits itself I can quickly restore it. Not sure how good Windows backup scheme is.