Bootcamp Install on Mac with unsupported GPU

[creaturesfarley]

Hi there all.

I'm using a MacPro Early 2009 with an AMD Radeon 7970 GPU. I've not flashed the GPU with the Mac EFI, so the mac doesn't display anything during startup until it loads the login screen. This is totally fine and useable.

My problem now is that I'm trying to install Windows 8 to a bootcamp partition. When I go through the bootcamp assistant, I get the good old 'No Bootable Device' error, so following tips from other people, I've tried rebooting my mac and holding down the option key so that I can manually select the device I want to boot from.

Which takes me back to my first issue - I can't actually see the screen, so can't select the boot device in this manner because my GPU isn't supported natively by my mac.

Does anyone know of a workaround for this? I feel a little stumped. It'd be particularly good if there was some way of setting my machine to boot from USB before I reboot. Any ideas?

 

[MacVidCards]

Startup disk preference pane or even the Bootcamp utility itself

 

[creaturesfarley]

If it's useful, I have another mac that I could use in target mode. Would this somehow work?

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Startup disk preference pane or even the Bootcamp utility itself

Can you expand on what you mean?

The startup disk preference pane doesn't give the option to boot from the USB drive. Should it?

The boot camp utility doesn't work - as I said, it gives me the "no bootable device" error.

 

[IowaLynn]

Hi there all.

I'm using a MacPro Early 2009 with an AMD Radeon 7970 GPU. I've not flashed the GPU with the Mac EFI, so the mac doesn't display anything during startup until it loads the login screen. This is totally fine and useable.

My problem now is that I'm trying to install Windows 8 to a bootcamp partition. When I go through the bootcamp assistant, I get the good old 'No Bootable Device' error, so following tips from other people, I've tried rebooting my mac and holding down the option key so that I can manually select the device I want to boot from.

Which takes me back to my first issue - I can't actually see the screen, so can't select the boot device in this manner because my GPU isn't supported natively by my mac.

Does anyone know of a workaround for this? I feel a little stumped. It'd be particularly good if there was some way of setting my machine to boot from USB before I reboot. Any ideas?

Disconnect all the other drives and devces.

I would not use BCA and partition an OS X drive, and use its own dedicated drive, probably a 250GB SSD or the like.

When you do have Windows installed, you can use the OS X BootChamp to select the startup drve.

Some people do need to have a Mac GPU onhand to get through the install.

If there is only one drive and that for Windows, no problem. And BCA is only of use to download drivers, and maybe to say "boot from my prepared ISO installer " which is generally a USB Flash drive off of which the install is initiated.