Resolved: rMBP, Bootcamp off thunderbolt drive - MORE COMPLETE SOLUTION

[murphychris]

Originally Posted by kimovski

Today tried installed on a HDD (WD Scorpio blue) through a thunderbolt adapter , after loading the windows files, the setup freezes

Lots of people are having problems installing Windows to either SSDs or HDDs through Thunderbolt.

Before tried with a 128 M4 SSD, installed without problems.

The enclosures are identical?

[kimovski]

Originally Posted by murphychris

Lots of people are having problems installing Windows to either SSDs or HDDs through Thunderbolt.



The enclosures are identical?

Both are completely naked, just plug to seagate thunderbolt adapter.

[murphychris]

Originally Posted by kimovski

Both are completely naked, just plug to seagate thunderbolt adapter.

So the same Thunderbolt adapter, only differing between SSD and HDD, and you get an install failure consistently to HDD but not SSD? Peculiar data point.

[kimovski]

Originally Posted by murphychris

So the same Thunderbolt adapter, only differing between SSD and HDD, and you get an install failure consistently to HDD but not SSD? Peculiar data point.

Well.. This is strange... The first try I have created 5GB of internal partition, the setup freezes. The 2nd try created 1GB of internal it freezes again...
Now the third time with 4GB which I'm installing right now, the setup goes smooth without problems.

Followed the steps, just changed the partition size...!

Cheers

[rMBP-Trimble]

Just wanted to thank those in this thread for helping me get Windows 8 installed and running on an external Thunderbolt Buffalo 1TB hard drive on my 15" rMBP (8GB, 250G SSD). I had some stumbles along the way but finally got it installed and running.

- When I tried booting EFI Windows reported that the drive had to be GPT formatted. What I should have been doing was selecting the Windows boot partition so it did the BIOS boot and required MBT partitioning.
- My first attempt at creating a Windows 8 USB stick with Bootcamp looked like it succeeded but the USB stick I used was low quality and it failed to install properly. Second attempt using a quality USB stick worked.

At some point in trying to do all of this I installed rEFIt but I think it got disabled during the Bootcamp process so I'm not sure it was needed at all.

Thanks again!

JT

[Maddux]

Hi Everybody,
Just wanted to report that the instructions are working perfectly for me. Tried and worked with Win7 and Win8 on a rMBP. Right now I'm running Win7 off a 5400 RPM drive attached through TB, but I'm going to replace it with an SSD. Has anybody tried cloning it to a new different external drive (using something like Winclone)? Does it still boot fine?

[Mikewh]

Originally Posted by Maddux

Hi Everybody,
Just wanted to report that the instructions are working perfectly for me. Tried and worked with Win7 and Win8 on a rMBP. Right now I'm running Win7 off a 5400 RPM drive attached through TB, but I'm going to replace it with an SSD. Has anybody tried cloning it to a new different external drive (using something like Winclone)? Does it still boot fine?

I think I cloned once with norton ghost and it worked fine from clone. (Did it a while a go)

[Cloudane]

Thank you! Now Windows 8 has finally agreed to install to my LaCie Thunderbolt SSD. I was having problems getting the installer to recognise it as a bootable drive without first going through the Boot camp Wizard and wasting 20GB of my internal drive.

I couldn't get the diskutil command to work but the trick was to use the GUI to create a 1GB FAT partition on the internal drive (less would probably be fine, but I'm sick of redoing it now) AND MAKE IT BOOTABLE/ ACTIVE. That is the key part. I don't know how to make a partition active in OS X but just used a bootable Ubuntu stick and ran gparted, then set the boot flag.

While in gparted, I created a new ms-dos (MBR) partition table on the thunderbolt SSD and made 1 partition. Booted into the Windows 8 installer, formatted the new SSD partition to NTFS and finally it installed!

[jniiiice]

i cant believe not one video walk through from this crew or even any video evidence

[jniiiice]

any one have any video of this working ... or a walk through

[tmanto02]

Is this method possible using a usb hard drive?

[Mikewh]

Originally Posted by tmanto02

Is this method possible using a usb hard drive?

no, from my experience I was not able to install or boot win 7 from usb 3 drive. It is theoretically possible to run but usb 3 drivers need to be injected into the boot. I understand win 8 may be better bet but I understand there are some compatibility or driver issues.

[Gascogne]

Originally Posted by Cloudane

Thank you! Now Windows 8 has finally agreed to install to my LaCie Thunderbolt SSD. I was having problems getting the installer to recognise it as a bootable drive without first going through the Boot camp Wizard and wasting 20GB of my internal drive.

I couldn't get the diskutil command to work but the trick was to use the GUI to create a 1GB FAT partition on the internal drive (less would probably be fine, but I'm sick of redoing it now) AND MAKE IT BOOTABLE/ ACTIVE. That is the key part. I don't know how to make a partition active in OS X but just used a bootable Ubuntu stick and ran gparted, then set the boot flag.

While in gparted, I created a new ms-dos (MBR) partition table on the thunderbolt SSD and made 1 partition. Booted into the Windows 8 installer, formatted the new SSD partition to NTFS and finally it installed!

Step by step guide would be awesome.

[mac jones]

I followed the OP's (first post updated) instructions to the letter and it worked for me on a 13" Retina. No issues and it installed easily.

Actually, this surprised me as it boots from windows on an external drive without any apparent drivers (before you install the support files).

You can see the SATA drivers for an instant when you boot, so I guess Apple has SATA drivers available no matter what. But it's strange.

BTW, I could only get 5GB as the minimum size internal partition (for some reason).

Anyway, a big thanks for this.

update:

I also managed to clone a Bootcamp partition using the new updated Winclone (yes there's a new version), and restore it to a thunderbolt drive. Then booting it from the 5GB FAT bootcamp machine works but gives an error. I then used a Windows 7 install disk and did a repair on the Thunderbolt drive and then it boots normally.

So to sum up: You can run Windows 7 from a TB drive and you can also clone a Bootcamp partition to this TB drive.

One thing that you have to do is before you clone any Bootcamp partition to another model macbook, is you need to uninstall the bootcamp support drivers (just the main one, not the individual drivers), otherwise You will run into problems, trust me. You can't just install Bootcamp support drivers on top of others from a different machine, and it won't even let you uninstall them normally once there there, so you need to get rid of them before you clone. You can then just go back and reinstall the original bootcamp support drivers that you deleted for the clone.

[aaronvb]

I followed the instructions from the first post and got it to work perfectly. Only thing I did differently was use the Disk Utility app to partition 5gb(FAT) instead of the command line.

I'm using the Seagate STAE128 Thunderbolt Adapter with a bare 2.5" Seagate Momentus 7200rpm 500gb Hard Drive on Macbook Pro 15 Retina(256gb SSD) using the Windows 7 Home Premium SP1 ISO.

Thanks a ton for this!

[thiagon]

Hey I created an account just to thank you guys for this post,

I was looking for a solution for months trying to boot from a USB 3.0 external HD but then I found out this possibility with the thunderbolt and tried it out.
(Didn't want to give so much for a Adapter + cable..)

Anyway,
I have a Samsung SSD 840 Series and a seagate thunderbolt adapter

The instructions given by the first post worked nicely here without any problem for me.

Just follow the instructions!

Again thanks for the help

[Gascogne]

Possible to install windows on external raid?
Like the Lacie Little Big Disk 512ssd thunderbolt.

Would like to create 2 different partitions on it, 256gb for os x and 256gb for windows.

So far I have managed but here is where I get stuck when trying to install windows. Windows finds a lot of partitions but no 256gb size... and can't install due to wrong filesystem (can't formst it to ntfs..).

Total newbie on mac but trying to learn.

*edit*
First will the above work or does it only work say if I remove the raid entirely and use the ssd's seperate in the little big disk (one for os x and one for windows).

[Gascogne]

Originally Posted by Cloudane

Thank you! Now Windows 8 has finally agreed to install to my LaCie Thunderbolt SSD. I was having problems getting the installer to recognise it as a bootable drive without first going through the Boot camp Wizard and wasting 20GB of my internal drive.

I couldn't get the diskutil command to work but the trick was to use the GUI to create a 1GB FAT partition on the internal drive (less would probably be fine, but I'm sick of redoing it now) AND MAKE IT BOOTABLE/ ACTIVE. That is the key part. I don't know how to make a partition active in OS X but just used a bootable Ubuntu stick and ran gparted, then set the boot flag.

While in gparted, I created a new ms-dos (MBR) partition table on the thunderbolt SSD and made 1 partition. Booted into the Windows 8 installer, formatted the new SSD partition to NTFS and finally it installed!

I also have a LaCie Thunderbolt SSD 512Gb which I removed the raid on and currently using one ssd for os x and the other one I'm trying to get windows 8 installed on but no success..

• I have made a usb stick with windows 8 on it with bootcamp.
• Made a 1Gb fat partition on the internal harddrive plus its bootable (used ubuntu for it).
• Created one single partition on the ssd which is going to have windows 8 on it.
• Managed to format it to ntfs when installing windows 8 but after formating it can't be installed on...
• Tried format it in ubuntu as well no luck.

These are the messages I get.

"Windows can't be installed to this disk. The computer hardware may not support booting to this disk."

"We couldn't create a new partition. [Error: 0x80004005]"

Help would be very much appreciated.

Imac 27" 2012

[jmcgeejr]

Originally Posted by Gascogne

I also have a LaCie Thunderbolt SSD 512Gb which I removed the raid on and currently using one ssd for os x and the other one I'm trying to get windows 8 installed on but no success..

• I have made a usb stick with windows 8 on it with bootcamp.
• Made a 1Gb fat partition on the internal harddrive plus its bootable (used ubuntu for it).
• Created one single partition on the ssd which is going to have windows 8 on it.
• Managed to format it to ntfs when installing windows 8 but after formating it can't be installed on...
• Tried format it in ubuntu as well no luck.

These are the messages I get.


Help would be very much appreciated.

Imac 27" 2012

I too am getting the same thing on my new iMac, I cant even install it to the internal sata drive.

[Gascogne]

Originally Posted by jmcgeejr

I too am getting the same thing on my new iMac, I cant even install it to the internal sata drive.

You can always try and check this thread.

[krravi]

Tried it on my rMBP as per the instruction in the OP and worked like a charm.

Using an external Thunderbolt Buffalo portable disk.

Also downloaded Lubbo Fan control and it works like a charm.

I created a 1 GB Bootcamp partition on the rMbp.

Was able to switch to Mac and Windows using option key at boot and no issues.

Update :

The lubbo fan control somehow stuck my fan at high RPM and never got down.

So here is the surprise. When I shut Windows down and booted back to Mac, the fans were still running high for no reason.

So looked up the procedure to reset SMC and saw that Apple recommends putting the computer to sleep, shutdown, restart.

Once I put the computer to sleep and woke it back again, the fans became quite.

So lubbo fan control is not as perfect as I thought it was....

But I have decided to get rid of the bootcamp partition. Don't want to deal with all this mess.

Will do virtual machines...

[murphychris]

Resizing with the 'diskutil resizevolume' command in Terminal lets you specify a size in MB, not just GB. Windows only needs 100MB for its boot partition.

Example only:

diskutil resizevolume disk0s2 106930M MS-DOS CAT 100M

So what you do first is 'diskutil resizevolume disk0s2 limits' to get the current size in bytes of the volume you want to shrink. Divide bytes value by 1000 twice to get MB, and subtract 102. That will shrink the volume by 100MB accounting for a bit of overhead. That's where I got 106930M in the example. MS-DOS is the format for the new 100MB volume, CAT is the name, and 100M is the size which is basically ignored because what matters is the new size of the OS X volume.

This can be done while the OS X volume is online (mounted and booted from).

For more info:

man diskutil