Hi everyone. I wanted to share my (unfortunate) experience with Boot Camp and maybe get some support if I did something wrong and this utility is not useless after all. So, I'm trying to install Win 10 via Boot Camp on a mid 2012 MBP (i7, 16 GB Ram, two SSDs). First, I got an official ISO of the 1803 version from MS's site (since I've read that later versions have some issues) and a 16 GB USB stick that I formatted as FAT with Disk Utility. Started Boot Camp, left all 3 options checked, and after I selected the iso and tried to continue, I got an error about "not enough space.....". Obviously, it's misleading, since it doesn't refer to the USB drive space, but to the install.wim file size of over 4 GB - and that's too big for FAT32.
While this seems all kinds of stupid to me - why would you have a Boot Camp utility that it's meant to install Windows 10 if Windows 10 is too big for the required FAT file system?! - I looked around and tried to split that file with some utility I found online. It worked, but this time I got another error at that step, about requiring a Windows 10 x64 iso bla bla. Again, puzzled. Digging around a little more, I found out that the damn thing actually checks the hash of the iso to match the original one from MS. Since the splitted iso has a different hash, it doesn't work. But you gotta "love" those meaningful errors...
3rd time is the charm, right? Wrong. This time I went a different way. I used Boot Camp to only download the support software - and it downloaded it directly on the usb stick - and manually copied the Windows iso contents to the usb drive. Then I turned off the Mac, disconnected the second ssd and booted from the stick. I was shocked to see the Windows logo and the spinning circle, it seemed it would actually work this time. Ran the setup, booted into Windows, the Boot Camp software installed fine, then one last reboot. But then the disappointment was back - I had no sound, and apparently no way in hell to make it work since (and this I found out after reading some more about the issue) Windows was installed in EFI mode. Ok...but HOW do I install it in Legacy/BIOS mode?!? Every website with some answer remotely related to this is saying "use Boot Camp, it knows to install in BIOS mode". Seriously?! It's like an endless loop...
Anyway, so much for my "quest" to have a fully functional Windows 10 on this Mac. If anyone else had a similar experience, do share it, specially if you managed to make it work somehow...
While this seems all kinds of stupid to me - why would you have a Boot Camp utility that it's meant to install Windows 10 if Windows 10 is too big for the required FAT file system?! - I looked around and tried to split that file with some utility I found online. It worked, but this time I got another error at that step, about requiring a Windows 10 x64 iso bla bla. Again, puzzled. Digging around a little more, I found out that the damn thing actually checks the hash of the iso to match the original one from MS. Since the splitted iso has a different hash, it doesn't work. But you gotta "love" those meaningful errors...
3rd time is the charm, right? Wrong. This time I went a different way. I used Boot Camp to only download the support software - and it downloaded it directly on the usb stick - and manually copied the Windows iso contents to the usb drive. Then I turned off the Mac, disconnected the second ssd and booted from the stick. I was shocked to see the Windows logo and the spinning circle, it seemed it would actually work this time. Ran the setup, booted into Windows, the Boot Camp software installed fine, then one last reboot. But then the disappointment was back - I had no sound, and apparently no way in hell to make it work since (and this I found out after reading some more about the issue) Windows was installed in EFI mode. Ok...but HOW do I install it in Legacy/BIOS mode?!? Every website with some answer remotely related to this is saying "use Boot Camp, it knows to install in BIOS mode". Seriously?! It's like an endless loop...
Anyway, so much for my "quest" to have a fully functional Windows 10 on this Mac. If anyone else had a similar experience, do share it, specially if you managed to make it work somehow...