Guild Wars 2

In case anyone else is jumping ship, be forewarned that installing Windows 7 Bootcamp from an external USB on a new Mavericks retina MBP is a NIGHTMARE. I spent all last night and all day today staring at progress bars and typing in cryptic commands until I finally found the right sequence. Hopefully this will help someone in my same situation.

Note: some familiarity with Terminal.app and cmd.exe would be helpful, and it wouldn’t hurt to brush up on Windows boot manager, EFI & EFI BIOS emulation, partitioning/filesystems/NTFS/HFS+, and Windows Recovery Environment. Basically this requires a compsci degree and 10 years experience or you will probably bork your OSX install.

First, if you are using a dodgy downloaded x86/x86_64 combined Windows ISO then you will need to trick Bootcamp Assistant into accepting the 32bit part.

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1561855

cp “/Applications/Utilities/Boot Camp Assistant.app” “~/Boot Camp Assistant.app”
edit ~/Boot Camp Assistant.app info.plist and add youir Mac’s identifier, something like <string>MacBookPro13,1</string> to 32BitSupportedModels

Then you need to sign your changes.

sudo codesign -fs – ~/Boot\ Camp\ Assistant.app/Contents/info.plist
sudo codesign -fs – ~/Boot\ Camp\ Assistant.app

Then you can put your ISO onto your USB drive. While it is downloading the Boot Camp crap that isn’t going to work, now would be a good time to download it yourself:

http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1638

Put that on another USB disk or add it to your Windows disk. You’ll need it at the end to manually install the drivers.

Repartition your drive with Boot Camp Assistant and let it reboot into your Windows USB disk. You have to boot into it this way or else it won’t detect your keyboard/trackpad.

Install Windows. It takes a long time. It will fail at the end saying some disk is missing. Reboot into your USB install disk and choose repair. Don’t let it do any of the auto startup repair or it might mess up the voodoo. Follow the instructions here to use the recovery console:

https://discussions.apple.com/message/24374055#24374055

bootrec /fixmbr
bootrec /fixboot
bootrec /rebuildbcd – (this successfully found 1 windows install, “Add installation to boot list?” “Y”, you should get “The requested system device cannot be found”)

(make the partition active, this assumes your drive is c)

diskpart
lis vol
sel vol c
act
exi

bcdboot c:\windows /s c:
bootsect /nt60 all /mbr

REBOOOOOOOOOT

Now it will almost be working. To get the Bootcamp drivers installed, you can’t just open them! Copy it to your local windows drive then open up an administrator cmd.exe (hint you can right-click with shift+F10) and cd to where you copied the drivers Drivers\Apple and run bootcamp.msi

https://discussions.apple.com/message/24411742#24411742

Each of those steps took 2-3 hours to figure out. All in all I don’t recommend it unless you are really familiar with this stuff as you can hose your OSX install at basically every step along the way. I can’t believe I resized that partition 15 times without destroying my filesystem.

Have fun!

Honestly I would suggest following this tutorial instead:
~/huguesval.com/blog/2012/02/installing-windows-7-on-a-mac-without-superdrive-with-virtualbox/

Although even that is pretty difficult to get right and it can be really confusing. But it means that you don’t have to try and work with an external drive and can just have the install files on your computer instead.

Wow, this is scary. What the hell did Apple do to the retina MBPs? I had no trouble at all installing Windows on an iMac.

I didn’t have nearly as much of a problem on my RMBP. I created a USB version of my Windows 7 disc and used BootCamp to setup the drive then installed. I’m not sure what’s going on that give you so much of a problem.

^— Yeah you should be able to do as Ceribis says for a rMBP. It’s only on an older MBP that you should have trouble installing Windows from a USB.

OSX can create a bootable Windows USB (on a new mac) through the bootcamp manager – and yes it takes a very long time to download the bootcamp files, but if you let it finish then it should work just fine.

FlamingFoxx.1305:

Honestly I would suggest following this tutorial instead:
~/huguesval.com/blog/2012/02/installing-windows-7-on-a-mac-without-superdrive-with-virtualbox/

I didn’t know what I was getting at to begin with or I would have looked for alternatives. This sounds like a much better way to go about it. http://huguesval.com/blog/2012/02/installing-windows-7-on-a-mac-without-superdrive-with-virtualbox/

FlamingFoxx.1305:

^— Yeah you should be able to do as Ceribis says for a rMBP. It’s only on an older MBP that you should have trouble installing Windows from a USB.

OSX can create a bootable Windows USB (on a new mac) through the bootcamp manager – and yes it takes a very long time to download the bootcamp files, but if you let it finish then it should work just fine.

Should should should should should just work. You sound like Apple

Those support threads I linked have scores of other people with new rMBPs having the same problems with the Win7 installation not completing properly and messing up the bootmgr. Bootcamp was always a kluge and in certain situations now it is extremely difficult to get installed.

I posted this to help others that might have the same problem jumping through all these hoops just to play a video game. I also posted it to show everyone saying “just install bootcamp it should be super easy” that bootcamp is tested about as well as a three-headed jungle wurm and it WILL break in many situations.

:S sounds nasty. I like the way I posted.
It involves creating a generalised install of Windows 7 in a virtualbox and then cloning it.
I’ve saved the cloned copy so now any time I’ve needed to reinstall all I do is partition the drive with bootcamp and then copy the cloned Win7 onto the new partition – don’t have to go through install times anymore or worry about things not working. It’s great.

Of course it wasn’t easy getting it to that point >.>