I recently replaced the DVD drive in my late 09 27" iMac with a SSD and did a reformat and portioning of my old internal HDD. Its been a few days and everything is up and running on the Mac OS side of the house so I wanted to add bootcamp onto my iMac. I run through the BootCamp assistance utility and gave Window 50gigs on my SSD. My iMac restarts but then hangs at the Apple logo screen until I hit the power button to shut it off. Any ideas on how to get Windows to install with bootcamp?
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Can't install Win 7 with BootCamp?
- Thread starter chargerman426
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That I believe is your only option. Macs that had optical drives need to have windows installed via the optical drive for some reason.
That sucks!!! I would have thought someone that had ripped the DVD drive out of their MBP would have a bootcamp install.
I've done it. Just use the DVD to install Windows, then replace the optical drive with a hard drive. If I need to reinstall either OS X or Windows, I put it back in. I can remove and replace my SuperDrive in less time than it takes to perform any of the workarounds to this issue I've found online. I stopped doing this a long time ago when ultra-high-capacity SSDs (750 GB+) became more affordable. Now I never have to remove my SuperDrive.
That's with a MacBook Pro. It's probably a bit more time consuming on an iMac considering what it takes to replace the RAM in those models.
I think that's we've been saying - it cannot be done, unless he puts the optical drive back into the computer.
That didn't work for me, I'm not sure why, but when I pulled the optical drive out of my MBP and put it inside a USB external case, it would not boot up. I think apple puts in place that you cannot install windows like this unless you have an MBA (or rMBP).
The last time I tried it, was a few years ago since maybe things changed or I was doing it wrong.
I tried to use my external blue-ray drive which didn't work. I also tried to make an iso of my Windows 7 disk and place that onto a USB stick which didn't work either. I've heard that their might be a problem with some of the early builds of Windows 7 and Macs. My disk is very early (like a week after Win 7 came out early) but it worked when I used it to install on my HDD before I had the internal HDD switched out by Apple when they recalled my HDD.
You're just wasting time, you can try 100s of different routes but you're still going to end up back on doesn't work avenue. I think I've only seen one person actually get the USB boot camp hack (google) to work, too.
Sooooo am I'm wasting my time by trying it 100s of ways or will it work because I can just "hack" a USB boot camp to work. Besides I'm not trying to run off an external USB I'm still running off an internal drive.
You're wasting your time.
There's a hack that allows those with removed ODDs to use Bootcamp to create a bootable USB but that's as far as it goes.
The installation itself must still be done via the internal ODD.
There's a hack that allows those with removed ODDs to use Bootcamp to create a bootable USB but that's as far as it goes.
The installation itself must still be done via the internal ODD.
Just bite the bullet and put the optical drive back in. you can have this done an in an hour or two, and be running windows, or you can spend days trying to get this to work, and then eventually giving up and putting the optical disk back into your computer.
If you have a legal ISO image then Boot Camp Assistant will let you make an official bootable Boot Camp installer drive. It must be the Microsoft ISO to my knowledge. Perhaps calling your friends over at Microsoft would help you in downloading the ISO provided you show the appropriate documentation.
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