[Tutorial] Enable windows 8 support in bootcamp for an unsupported mac

Hi,

trying to install windows 8 on my wives' mid 2010 13' macbook pro, and I ran into some issues since this mac is not supported for windows 8. I have spent some time trying to find the solution, but didn't find what I actually wanted, so thought I'd post this to help some of you out if you run into the same crap.

Now I do not know what crashes or fails or why in general did they make this (and other) macs unsupported for windows 8, so do this at your own risk.

First of all, I wanted to perform a bootable usb install on this mac. This was the first problem I ran into as I am running Mavericks. Usb bootable installation is also unsupported here. This great tutorial helped me out to get this issue resolved.


However with this you still cannot create a bootable windows 8 usb.

(If you follow the tutorial above you will have a backup of the info.plist file, if you don't have a backup create one using the first command in the above tutorial.)

Now to enable win 8 support you have to go to the terminal and copy this line:

Go to the very bottom of the file and you will see a key headed <key>Win7OnlyModels</key>. Simply change 7 to 8 so the key name would be <key>Win8OnlyModels</key>. Then add your mac version identifier to the list next to all the other macs in the same format. (i.e. <string>MacBookPro7,1</string>) (you can find the identifier by going to apple menu->about this mac->more info->system report).

Press control + x to exit, press y to save, press enter.

There you go. You have enabled windows 8 support for a mac that is not on the list.

Note: After performing these steps I managed to create a bootable usb drive with windows 8.1 and install windows 8.1 on this mac that used to be unsupported. Hope this saves you some time.

Good luck.

Yes, that's exactly what I did.

I am trying to get all the stuff working on win 8.1 at the moment as I just finished the instalation a couple of hours ago.

As of now the video started working fine after the first restart of windows. Drivers installed automatically for the gpu. I instaled trackpad++ for the touchpad. Also working fine. Wireless was working fine on the very first boot of the new windows, and did not have any problems with it yet. Did not test out wired but I believe it should work aswell.

At the moment I am trying to get the keyboard up and running as it should. Currently the shortcuts are not responding. Will test out the camera when I fix the keyboard. I will update you on how everything went once I finish.

Will try to install the windows 7 drivers provided with the bootcamp. Basically windows 8 is working fine with win 7 drivers in general so hoping for good results with that.

Ok so yesterday I have spent quite some time with the drivers and this is what I can say:
there are no problems with audio, lan, web cam or video. What I did was downloaded bootcamp drivers for windows 8 externally and installer them all by hand. After that there were two devices in device manager not working properly. I update the drivers for the devices from device manager and everything was working fine. Device manager was clean.

However while all the other stuff was working there was no support for the keyboard (hotkeys and backlight) and the trackpad. As mentioned above for the trackpad I installed trackpad ++ which works perfectly, though one time I noticed it was using around 60% of the cpu... I killed it and on the next boot everything was fine. Don't know whats all that about... So after this I have the trackpad working nicely. The only thing remaining is the keyboard to a full win8 "support"... Spent a few hours trying to get that running but with no luck...

So basically for now I have a perfectly functional windows 8.1 on this mac, the only thing missing is the keyboard support. Thats a bummer but not something that would break the deal, so for now I will leave it as is and try to get the keyboard running in the future.