Windows 10 Boot Camp
Now with updates at the bottom of the article!
I have been running Windows 10 on my laptop at home for a number of weeks now and have grown quite fond of it. The new features are great, and make it well worth the trouble of running beta software. The releases are now stable enough to pass muster as a daily driver.
I work as an IT Analyst for a local Managed Services Provider in Southwest Louisiana and work from home occasionally. In our office all of us have dual-monitor configurations. I have the same thing at home with a 27-inch iMac and accompanying 27-inch HP adjustable monitor — both running at the same resolution.
I had been contemplating either installing Windows 10 in Parallels — but that would require having to pay for an upgrade — or installing Windows 10 in Boot Camp, but without fully-supported drivers. I did not want to pay for an upgrade of Parallels for something I would only use occasionally. Plus, installing Windows in Boot Camp can result in better performance, because Windows can take full advantage of running directly on hardware. Additionally, running on hardware would allow the benefit of using both monitors.
Note: Due to bandwidth limitations I approached the install of Windows 10 manually, completely bypassing the Boot Camp Assistant.
In order to install Windows 10 on a Mac you either need a secondary internal drive or a second partition on your primary internal drive. Since I had a 1 TB internal drive, I decided to create a second partition on the primary drive.
I did this by launching the Disk Utility and, while having the primary internal drive selected, clicked the Partition tab. I was greeted by an interface displaying the Partition Layout with just my Macintosh HD partition listed. I added an additional partition, filling in the Name and Format fields as I wanted to new partition to be seen. The partition did not matter at this point, so I chose something Windows would recognize: ExFat. I then moved the slider between the two partitions until I found the balance that I wanted.
It should be noted here, if you run into any complications and have to change the size of your new partition, you will run into errors. The primary partition cannot be adjusted while in use — this includes booting into the Recovery Partition. In order to reconfigure any partition size you will have to boot from an USB installer of OS X. You either have to get it right the first time or create a USB installer of OS X before you begin. I ran into this issue when I did not realize I had to drag the slider in the middle to adjust the sizes of the partition and just typed it in the Size field instead, which did nothing.
After I had the additional partition created I rebooted the system. I held the Option key to select from which drive I wanted to boot and was presented with all of the different options. Since I already had an ISO of Windows 10 burned to a DVD, I booted from the Windows Installer DVD.
I was immediately presented with the Windows 10 setup screen, but to begin the setup process I had to find a USB mouse. The required drivers for the Bluetooth mouse that came with my iMac were not included in the Windows 10 installer package. During the setup I had to reformat the newly created ExFat partition to NTFS, because Windows 10 will not install on FAT or ExFat. This only took a few seconds, as it was a quick format.
After configuring the installation just as I wanted it the installer ran through the rest of the install process, the computer rebooted and presented me with the OS X desktop. It is then that I remembered OS X was set as my default boot destination. This was fine for me, as my wife uses the computer often and would not want to have to pick an environment to boot the computer into each time she has to restart the iMac.
I rebooted the iMac and held the Option key. I then selected the newly installed Windows partition from which to boot. Windows continued the setup process as I removed the DVD from my external drive. I was finally presented with the Windows Desktop, but found that my iMac’s Bluetooth Magic Mouse did not work, because the drivers for the device were also not included in the default Windows drivers. I also noticed that my second monitor was not receiving a video signal from the Thunderbolt port.
Since this was a completely manual install of Windows — I did not use the Boot Camp Assistant — I had to figure the next part out by myself, finding drivers. I searched the Apple site, plus Googled for the correct drivers for my late-2013 iMac. After a while, and much honing of my search terms, I landed on a page from Apple that allowed me to download the stand-alone Boot Camp drivers for Windows.
Don’t make the same mistake I did: The list on the page that hosts the drivers is a list of computers that are not compatible with the drivers on the page. Since I just skimmed over the page and saw my computer model in the list, I downloaded those drivers. I have a very slow connection and terrible ISP, so the drivers took 6–8 hours to download. I tried to install them, but kept getting an error message. So, I had to download the correct drivers all over again, because I had the wrong ones the first time. Once again, measure twice, cut once.
Once the drivers had been downloaded I was able to begin the install process, which was straight forward. I launched the setup file and it installed almost all of the drivers I needed automatically. I say “almost”, because it did not install the video driver for my nVidia GeForce GT 755M. I had to manually download the drivers from the nVidia site. But, once I had them installed my second monitor also started working correctly, so it was a performance win all the way around.
At this point all I had left to do was install Windows Updates and desired software. The install was complete. Because my time was restrained along with my connection speed, this entire process took three days. If a person were to complete all the steps correctly the first time, plus had a whole day to dedicate towards this project with a respectable Internet connection, it should not take more than a day to complete.
Updates: Apple now officially supports Windows 10 in Boot Camp on Yosemite!
The Verge has a good story on how to properly install Windows 10 in Boot Camp on your Mac!
If you plan on completing the same process, or have done so in the past, let me know. I’m also available on Twitter if you need help: @djmoore711
