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Installing Windows on a 2011 Mac mini - Is this even possible?

l008com

l008com

macrumors regular
Original poster
I have a 2011 mac mini with a radeon GPU. I'm trying to turn it into a retro gaming machine. It has a clean install of High Sierra on an SSD and I'm trying to install Windows on it. I originally wanted to install windows 10. But after some reading, I hear its easier to start with windows 7 so you can get all of the drivers etc, and then upgrade from within windows, to 10.

Windows 7 is officially supported on this machine by bootcamp. But nothing I try will get it to work. I tried making an install USB flash drive from bootcamp assistant, and I made one using 3rd party program unetbootin. But alas, "No bootable device".

I tried putting a physical DVD in my 2012 MacBook Pro, put it into target disk mode, and plugged it in to my 2011 mac mini via Firewire. The disk showed up but it was unable to boot off of it.

I tried hooking up an old 1 TB hard drive to an old USB 2 to SATA adapter cable. No bootable device.

Then I finally hooked up the mini to another tower that has an optical drive, with the USB SATA adapter teathered to that external optical drive. FINALLY I am able to get the computer to START to boot off of my windows disk, but it never makes it through the first progress bar before failing and freezing.

NOTE: 2011 Mac minis DO NOT have internal optical drives.

So what other options do I have here? How can I do this? I really want to get at least windows 7 on this Mac even if I never upgrade it to Win 10. But that seems very impossible here.

The only thing I've read that I wasn't able to try was specifically a USB2 flash drive. I don't have any of those. But imaging the WIn 7 ISO to a USB2 hard drive and USB2 SATA SSD drive both did not work.

Oh I also tried making a windows installer on an SD card since this Mac has a built in card reader. No luck.

There must be SOME way do install windows on here? How universal are Windows installations? Can I put the boot drive in my 2012 macbook directly, or connected via firewire or usb, install windows on to it that way, then take the drive out and put it back in to the mini? Will it be able to boot a different machine?
If firewire worked for this, I could put the 2011 in target disk mode and skip the physical drive removal which would be nice.

BTW that windows 7 64bit physical disc I have, that the 2011 can't seem to boot off of. My 2012 macbook pro boots up off of it fine. As have the many other Macs I've used it to install from over the years.
 
The Windows Install.app program allows you to install Windows directly from the Mac OS system.
There is no need to create an installation flash drive.
Suitable for Hackintosh and Macintosh (install drivers yourself). Possibility to make a backup.
There is a drag and drop support function.
Compatible with Mac OS X 10.13 and up.
The utilities used are wimlib and ntfs-3g and others.

Disk access must be granted (shown in the screenshot)
The user must be an administrator and the password must be from the administrator.
Intel only!
Click to expand...

sourceforge.net

Windows Install

Download Windows Install for free. Installing Windows from macOS. Suitable for Hackintosh and Macintosh. The Windows Install.app program allows you to install Windows directly from the Mac OS system. There is no need to create an installation flash drive.
sourceforge.net sourceforge.net
 
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I second the Windows Install app suggestion. Used it to install win 10 iot ltsc (support till 2032) on a 2011 macbook air, worked like a charm.

Put Windows Install app and windows iso on a high sierra or higher external drive. Boot from the external drive and install to internal drive partition formatted to exfat. Use the legacy boot setting.
Took about 12 minutes to install via usb2.

massgrave.dev

Windows LTSC Download | MAS

All download links lead to genuine files only.
massgrave.dev massgrave.dev
 
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I 3rd the suggestion. I personally used it to install Windows 10 on an iMac 2011 a while ago.

Here are the steps:-

- Install MacOS on an external HDD, and boot from it. This is important, as you can't boot from the same HDD you're going to install Windows 10 into.
- Use the tool to install Windows 10 from the ISO.
 
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I'm going to try it out tonight and if it works, I'm going to have to start hanging out here more because nobody at any other place I seeked help (reddit, apple forum) knew anything about this tool.
 
Excellent job everyone! My first install failed but I re-did a second time using the "legacy boot" option and it started right up.

Next question, is there a chart somewhere showing what bootcamp bundles work with which Macs and which versions of Windows? And download links too perhaps?
 
Update: I had an old copy of bootcamp 5 so I just installed that and it seems to have worked.
Theres an update to Apple Software Updaters (2.2) that always shows up in apple software update windows, but the update always fails. And when I tried to manually install it, no luck. Google seems to have mixed up apple software update 2.2 with bootcamp 2.2. Any ideas what to do with that?
 
l008com said:
Excellent job everyone! My first install failed but I re-did a second time using the "legacy boot" option and it started right up.

Next question, is there a chart somewhere showing what bootcamp bundles work with which Macs and which versions of Windows? And download links too perhaps?
Click to expand...
gist.github.com

macOS and BootCamp Latest

macOS and BootCamp Latest. GitHub Gist: instantly share code, notes, and snippets.
gist.github.com gist.github.com
 
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Congratulation! As for that update, I downloaded the latest Bootcamp support files directly from Apple before installation, and I still go that update prompt. It fails every time, so I decided to just ignore it.
 
Ok almost everything is installed and working properly. I just have one issue left:

I have an old copy of Winclone that I used to make a backup of the old machine (the 2010 running Win 7)

On the new machine (2010), I did a clean install of windows 10.

NOW I need to copy over some save files from the backup of the old machine. But no can do. I can't find any program that can read a winclone disk image (or the compressed .img file inside of it) on a Mac. And of course I don't want to 'restore' the image to the drive thats already setup and running - running a newer system anyway. I'm trying to restore the image to a USB Thumb drive, but every time I try, Winclone complains about not being able to set the permissions properly, or something like that.

Is there an easy fix here? Some program that can convert the winclone image to a regular image. I only need to copy a handful of files and then I'm good to go.
 
Doesn't Winclone give you the ability to mount and view the backed up image and select files to restore?
 
Wouldn't that be nice... but no.
Newer versions have a feature where you can convert to a normal disk image but thats a pay feature and my old version doesn't have it. Very frustrating, I'm going to have to rig up something big and annoying to do this.
 
Doesn't Winclone compress an image into a .wim file?
You can unzip a .wim file in Windows using dism++. For instructions, use a search engine, such as Google.
You can also use my "Windows Install" program to install a Windows .wim image onto an external drive/flash drive. We don't intend to boot the system on the external drive, but you will still have access to the files.
Winclone and "Windows Install" both use the same wimlib library (https://wimlib.net/) to install Windows.
 
Winclone apparently uses something called ntscclone which I couldn't find anyway to access via Mac. And the partition I was making in windows was too small to hold this image. In the end, I had to grab another 2010 mini, do a clean install of El Capitan, make a windows 10 bootable installer, but not use it, just have it plugged in to let bootcamp allow me to create a bootcamp partition, and then finally restore the winclone image to copy 18 MB of files off of it. It was an insane process but in the end, I got what I needed and this machine works prettyyyyyy good
 
l008com said:
Wouldn't that be nice... but no.
Click to expand...
Well if winclone doesn't include the functionality, I doubt very much some other developer has done it. I'm assuming its a proprietary file format, so you have that working against you
 
It is a bundle but the raw image inside is a .img file, but nothing can mount it and the type is ntfsclone.
 
l008com said:
It is a bundle but the raw image inside is a .img file, but nothing can mount it and the type is ntfsclone.
Click to expand...
Try renaming this .img file to .wim. Then drag this file into the "Windows Install" window. If the program accepts it and displays an index, it's a .wim archive.
 
Its too late now, its all gone. Newer versions of Winclone do have a 'restore to disk image' feature that effectively converts it to a mac image, so you can access files for it. But I didn't want to pay for a newer version for a one time use
 
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