Battling to install Windows on Mac Pro

[genetic]

I've been battling to install Windows 10 on my Mac Pro.

I had Windows 7 installed a while back for games, but since removed it. I want to play a game or two, so need to install Windows again.

It seems El Capitan has changed the way Boot Camp / partitions work. Boot camp will create a bootable USB drive, but Windows won't install from it. A Windows 10 DVD won't work either. It throws the error "The selected disk has an MBR partition table". According to some forums the EFI BIOS that Apple uses is the problem.

Has anyone installed Windows on their Mac using El Capitan successfully?

 

[ponder]

Did you install from an iso file and was it the 64bit version?

 

[genetic]

Did you install from an iso file and was it the 64bit version?

Yep. Win 10 64bit.

Gonna try remove the other hard drives from the machine and only leave the main OS X / Windows partitioned drive. Managed to get "Windows" to boot but it brings up a missing boot error on start. So maybe it's trying to boot from one of the other 3 drives in the machine.

Unfortunately you can't access the BIOS on a Mac which makes it harder.

 

[genetic]

So Win 7 worked - it allowed me to format the drive where Win 10 didn't for some reason. Formatted the drive, restarted then booted to the Win 10 USB.

Win 10 is now installing to the drive. Problem solved.

 

[phly]

If you can, please report back on yur findings in terms of how win10 runs in comparison to how windows 7 ran. I'm running El capitan and have windows 10 on the other side however i find that my fans spin the moment i get into windows and hardly quiet down. Also i suspect the battery gets used up way more on windows side perhaps due to how it manages power as opposed to El capitan.

So i'm just curious how windows 7 runs and if it runs better on the same hardware as opposed to windows 10. If it's not too much trouble though.

 

[genetic]

Will report back once all is up and running.

Did you install the Boot Camp drivers in your Win 10 setup?

https://support.apple.com/kb/DL1720?locale=en_GB

It installs all the drivers necessary for Windows to communicate to all the proprietary hardware.

 

[genetic]

If you can, please report back on yur findings in terms of how win10 runs in comparison to how windows 7 ran.

Win 10 is running flawlessly. Had some issues with Boot Camp and the drivers for the AMD video card, but once sorted everything worked. Performance seems identical to Win 7.

Got a 1TB WD Black drive as my main drive. Partitioned 250GB to Windows so I can play Far Cry 4. Use OS X for everything else.

Far Cry 4 runs flawlessly at max settings. Even after a while of playing the fans don't speed up.

Running a dual quad-core Xeon E5620 2.4GHz setup with 32GB RAM and a Radeon HD5870 GPU. Not designed for games, but it seems to play them just fine.

I have not installed Windows on my MacBook Pro though, so can't comment on battery life. Did have Win7 on my MBP a while back, but that seemed to run fine too. I doubt Windows will get the same battery life as OS X, as OS X is written for your machine's bespoke setup, allowing for much greater energy efficiency.

 

[phly]

Thanks for the feedback. And yes i have all the drivers installed and set up. I just have my windows 10 via bootcamp for games as well some programs that are windows specific. Otherwise my daily driver is now OSX. I did get to play with the power settings and I haven't heard the fan spin up on my windows 10 as it did before. Just used some method I had tried on my former dell and now all seems well for now.

Thanks again for the feedback. Think I will try stick to windows 10 for now.

 

[vinodh]

The trick is not to use Bootcamp to partition. Use Bootcamp to make a USB installer and Bootcamp drivers only. That way you will have a EFI USB drive that can use EFI mode only. Partition using Disk Utility and then boot from the USB installer using the Option key. Choose the drive and install Windows 10 as per normal.

Windows will chuck the boot loader files into the EFI partition and Windows and OS X will then dual boot in pure EFI mode via the Option key. If you want the boot loader to look pretty, mount the EFI partition and change it's logo to a Windows logo.