Hi all,
I have been fighting a brave battle with my mid-2011 iMac for the past few days. I want to install Windows 7 so I can use my HOTAS flight control stick for a few games... However, it seems the Apple support for Boot Camp for Windows 7 has somewhat weakened for older machines. This computer is not capable of running Windows 10 (allegedly) so I settled on a Windows 7 install.
I have a fresh new install of macOS High Sierra, and a mostly-empty 500 gb hard drive. I have been attempting to follow Apple's guidance here.
I torrented an x64 ISO of Windows 7 Professional from this link (looks to be a web archive version of the old Digital River, which was Microsoft's way of software distribution; was recommended on an old reddit thread). Boot Camp would not recognize the ISO as a bootable copy of Windows, saying "Please insert the disk and wait for it to be recognized". So, I settled on attempting a non-Boot Camp install.
I followed a procedure to use the "sudo dd" algorithm in Terminal to copy the ISO onto a FAT-32 formatted flash drive, which seems to have worked (there is a setup.exe file in there along with a lot of other files) but when I tried to boot to it directly by holding the Option key, I didn't see it as a bootable drive. Boot Camp will not recognize this drive either.
Does anybody have any useful further guidance? I would love to repurpose this old machine, which runs like a champ (I have 20 gb of RAM which probably helps).
Thanks!
I have been fighting a brave battle with my mid-2011 iMac for the past few days. I want to install Windows 7 so I can use my HOTAS flight control stick for a few games... However, it seems the Apple support for Boot Camp for Windows 7 has somewhat weakened for older machines. This computer is not capable of running Windows 10 (allegedly) so I settled on a Windows 7 install.
I have a fresh new install of macOS High Sierra, and a mostly-empty 500 gb hard drive. I have been attempting to follow Apple's guidance here.
I torrented an x64 ISO of Windows 7 Professional from this link (looks to be a web archive version of the old Digital River, which was Microsoft's way of software distribution; was recommended on an old reddit thread). Boot Camp would not recognize the ISO as a bootable copy of Windows, saying "Please insert the disk and wait for it to be recognized". So, I settled on attempting a non-Boot Camp install.
I followed a procedure to use the "sudo dd" algorithm in Terminal to copy the ISO onto a FAT-32 formatted flash drive, which seems to have worked (there is a setup.exe file in there along with a lot of other files) but when I tried to boot to it directly by holding the Option key, I didn't see it as a bootable drive. Boot Camp will not recognize this drive either.
Does anybody have any useful further guidance? I would love to repurpose this old machine, which runs like a champ (I have 20 gb of RAM which probably helps).
Thanks!