Resolved Trouble loading Bootcamp with attached dev.

[roadkill401]

My 2014 Retina iMac doesn't like most things. One of it's downfall's is that if you have anything remotely usefull attached to it, it won't work. I got the iMac so that i could use it for the OSx side of things but still have the ability to reboot into Windows to play some games.

But, if I have my (original) microsoft xbox360 wireless gamepad receiver hooked up, you can't boot the iMac.

But if I have any thunderbolt drive hooked up to the iMac, then mt Win7 bootcamp will stall after the psudo bios screen fashes up and you are stuck to get it to load.

But if you have a USB hard drive plugged in, you have a 50% chance that it will just reboot itself and you have to try again holding down your option key to select Windows.

I have Win7 right now installed as bootcamp. There is not enough free drive space or something else wrong that won't let me upgrade the install to Win10. Bootcamp assistant won't let me delete the bootcamp install, so I can't even try to load Win10 on the internal SSD. I did get somehow a copy of Win10 installed on a 500gb harddrive via USB3 that will work but it's noisy as heck and I know the drive is about to die. I have never managed to get it work off a new SSD.

I have a Thunderbolt drive that I have but can't figure out how to get Windows 10 to load onto it. I don't know if I have to figure out how to delete the current bootcamp and get the partition back to being a single drive and try again to get bootcamp to work.

Has anyone managed to get Windows 10 loaded onto a thunderbolt SSD drive? If so what are the instructions?

 

[roadkill401]

To partially answer my own question, I did get Windows 10 installed onto the thunderbolt drive. To get this done, I booted into my Windows 7 bootcamp. Loaded the Windows 10 migration tool and setup a bootable USB drive. With the USB plugged into the back of the iMac and holding down the option key, I selected the EFI Boot option. It allowed me to select the Thunderbolt drive but to get it to install, I had to delete all the partitions on the drive and let the Windows 10 install app create new ones for me. This allowed me to install Windows 10 but not the Apple BootCamp utilities.

I had copied the bootcamp directory from the USB drive that I had made using Bootcamp Assistant, but sadly could not get to work. When I run the setup app from the bootcamp directory is complains about needing something like $$WinPE?? to be in the same directory as bootcamp.

Is there an executable version of bootcamp that works with Windows 10 that I can run to get the bootcamp files loaded right?

 

[roadkill401]

I ended up deleting and re-installing the Windows 10 on my thunderbolt drive and got Bootcamp to install correctly.

To get the drivers, apple is not all the forthcoming about it both online and by phone. If you run the bootcamp assistant, and click the Action pulldown from the top menu bar, there is an option to download a copy of the bootcamp software. This can be extracted onto a USB drive and if you do a clean install of Windows10 and then run the software first before doing anything else, it will properly configure the windows just as if you ran the automated install.

The mac still does not like my UPS plugged into my usb3 hub, nor does it like the Microsoft Xbox360 controller. I am considering getting one of the newer Xbox ONEs units, so that is supposed to have bluetooth capable, so i won't need the dongle.. But it's just more money i don't have.