install windows 7 on mac partition without bootcamp

You see, when BCA innocently partitions your hard drive to the inclusion of a new Windows “BOOTCAMP” partition, on the surface it appears to have formatted the BOOTCAMP partition into a FAT32 format in anticipation of the Windows.īut what it also did (unfortunately) is inadvertently change the identification of your entire hard drive which was, for all intents and purposes a GPT disk into a Hybrid GPT/MBR disk. Unbeknownst to you – this is where the problem starts.

One partition for your existing OS X and another for the incoming Windows 8/8.1. You launch Boot Camp Assistant (BCA) and during the preparation phase where BCA creates a bootable USB version of your Windows 8/8.1 with Apple Boot Camp support drivers it then eventually requires you to partition your existing hard drive. Lets look at the most probable root cause of the problem. If not, you just wasted an entire day (or more) to format and restore your Mac back to the same frustrating situation you were in before. If you’re fortunate the proposed solution worked. Its almost goes without saying that for most of us we will not be particularly enthused with destructive fixes because it is not uncommon these days to have a minimum of a 1TB hard drive and even if its half full, it will still take about the average of half a day to back up and another half to restore it.

Whilst others require complicated risqué Terminal commands. There are a plethora of articles on the internet aimed at solving this.įrom using Disk Utility to delete and/or reformat the BOOTCAMP partition into ExFAT or destructive measures that require the formatting of your entire hard drive and reinstalling OS X and Boot Camp from scratch.

The selected disk is of the GPT partition style.” You’ve done everything according to the Apple Boot Camp Windows Installation Guide but now you’re stuck staring at a Windows error message, “Windows cannot be installed on this disk. This article is dedicated to dealing with the nasty frustrating GPT error encountered during the actual Windows 8/8.1 Boot Camp installation. Boot Camp 5.1 now support Windows 8 and Windows 8.1. Unfortunately installation some times is not as straight forward as it should be.

Install windows 7 on mac partition without bootcamp