Ken Thompson has an automobile which he helped design. Unlike most automobiles, it has neither speedometer, nor gas gauge, nor any of the numerous idiot lights which plague the modern driver. Rather, if the driver makes any mistake, a giant “?” lights up in the center of the dashboard. “The experienced driver”, he says, “will usually know what’s wrong.”

Launch the Boot Camp Assistant application, which is in your Utilities folder. This step creates a partition on your hard drive for your Windows installation. Install Windows on the new partition. From now on, you can hold down Option during startup and choose to start up from either the macOS Mojave disk partition or the new Windows partition.
Launch the Boot Camp Assistant application, which is in your Utilities folder. This step creates a partition on your hard drive for your Windows installation. Install Windows on the new partition. From now on, you can hold down Option during startup and choose to start up from either the macOS Mojave disk partition or the new Windows partition.

How to install Boot Camp software on your Windows 10 partition. When Windows 10 loads for the first time on your Mac, a Boot Camp software installer will automatically pop up. Click I accept the terms in the license agreement. Click Finish when the installation is complete.

(Source: BSD Unix Fortune Program)

I recently managed to install a current Windows 10 distribution onto an older iMac that I had in storage. I wanted to set up this machine to run some specific Windows software for which it was well suited, and that let me make good use of an otherwise idle machine.

The iMac has a then-fastest-around 2.9Ghz CPU and features the (then) latest and greatest storage innovation, the ‘Fusion Drive’. This is a small SSD blended with a 1Tb Hard Drive. The Fusion Drive was designed to leverage fast-but-expensive SSD’s with slow-but-cheap hard drives, before SSD’s got so cheap that the hard drive became almost irrelevant.

My intention was install Windows 10 using Bootcamp, with an arbitrary 50/50 split of the 1.1Tb Fusion Drive.

At the start of the fateful weekend concerned, I recall thinking ‘how hard can this be?’ because I’d installed Windows using Bootcamp on my current-generation MacBook Pro (with a big SSD) with zero issues at all.

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Turns out the answer is: ‘Very Hard’.

I had to get past multiple ‘I should give up because there is no apparent way around this, and the error message gives me no help at all’ situations, spread across what became an entire weekend of trial-and-effort and repeated fruitless attempts at things that took ages, punctuated with just enough ‘ah hah’ moments and clues found via Google to keep me doing it…!

I didn’t find the entire list of challenges I faced in any single web site, so I have decided to write my discoveries down here, in an ‘integrated’ manner. Each of these issues represents some hours of repeated head-banging attempts to get past it that I hope to save you, dear reader, from repeating.

I am assuming in the below that you know how to do a Windows installation using Bootcamp (or are prepared to work that out elsewhere). This isn’t a guide to doing that – its a guide to why the process failed – and failed, and failed, and failed – for me.

Each item below starts with a headline that frames the fix – so if you mostly just want to get it done – just dance across those headlines for a fast path to a working result.

You really need to be running Mojave (Mac OS X 10.14)

I fired up Bootcamp under the OS on the machine at the time – Mac OX 10.13 – and it said it could install windows 7 or later. Well, I wanted to install the latest release of Windows 10, and that’s ‘later’, right?

Wrong.

On this model of Mac you need to use an appropriately large (16GB or more) USB stick. Bootcamp writes the Windows 10 install ISO you’ve downloaded by now (you have, right?) onto that USB stick and turns that into a bootable Windows install drive (including throwing the ‘Bootcamp’ driver set onto it, to be installed into the Windows image once the base install is done).

Well, I plugged in a 16Gb USB stick (actually, I tried several sticks ranging from 8Gb to 32Gb, fruitlessly). In each case, after scratching around for ages, Bootcamp failed with an error message say that my USB stick wasn’t large enough.

Some Google searching turned up the key information here – that Windows 10’s recent ISO’s are large enough that they cross an internal 4GB size boundary that in turn leads to Bootcamp not being able to cope with it properly.

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The answer looked to be easy – upgrade to Mojave.

Ok, annoying but straightforward. Cue the download and install process, and come back in several hours…

You also need to update Mojave to the very latest version

Turns out that the build of Mojave one downloads from the App Store isn’t the very latest version (Why isn’t the very latest version? Beats me!).

Bootcamp on the base release of Mojave says it can install Windows 10 or later (not ‘Windows 7 or later’). Yay – that suggests the bug has been sorted out – after all, it mentions Windows 10!

Sorry, but no. Same failure mode, after the same long delay to find out. Argh!

More Googling – turns out the bug didn’t get triggered until some very recent Windows 10 builds, and the base Mojave build still had that (latent) bug when it was released.

Next step is, thus, a Mac OS update pass to move up to the very latest Mojave build, including a version of Bootcamp with the issue resolved in it. This is in fact documented on the Apple support site (if you own 20:20 hindsight).

You may need to back up, wipe and restore your entire Mac OS Drive before Bootcamp’s Partitioning phase will succeed

This one was painful.

After Bootcamp managed to set up my USB stick properly, and managed to download and copy on the Bootcamp windows drivers in as well, it then failed to partition the drive successfully (the last step before it triggers the Windows installation to commence).

As usual, the error message was useless:

Your disk could not be partitioned ; An error occurred while partitioning the disk. Please run Disk Utility to check and fix the error.

The problem here is that I did run Disk Utility to check and fix the error, and no error was fixed!

The Disk First Aid run came up clean – said my disk was fine.

I tried booting from “Recovery Mode” and running Disk First Aid again – nope, still no error found or fixed.

Time to dive deeper – open up the display of detailed information (the little triangle that can be used to pop a window of debug text) during the underlying fsck…

…One tiny clue turns up – a succession of warnings in the midst of the checking process, a warning (not a failure) involving something about ‘overflows’. Turns out that Disk First Aid (‘fsck’, really), within Disk Utility doesn’t fix these issues – it just declares the disk to be ok and finishes happily despite them.

Disk Utility can even partition the drive just fine – but the Partition function in Bootcamp itself … fails.

The fix turns out to be annoyingly radical: Do a full system backup, and then do a full system restore.

So – break out a spare USB hard drive to direct-connect (less angst and potentially higher I/O rate than doing it over the network). Use Time Machine to back up the whole machine to that local storage, then boot in recovery mode and restore the system from that drive again.

This takes… along time. All day and half the night.

However – it helped! When I tried yet once more, after this radical step… now the Bootcamp partition step works – hazzah!

And then Windows 10 starts to install itself at last – hazzah!

In the windows installer, you may need to format the partition designated for Windows

Once windows starts to install process, it reaches a point where it displays all drive partitions and asks you to just pick the one to install Windows onto.

Merely selecting the right partition (the one helpfully labelled BOOTCAMP) doesn’t work. It fails, saying the partition is in the wrong format.

It seems that some inexplicable reason Bootcamp has left the intended Windows partition in the wrong state as far as the Windows installer is concerned.

The fix is to bravely select the partition concerned (again: its helpfully labelled BOOTCAMP)… and hit the ‘Format’ button to reformat it. Then you can re-select it – and the installation now starts to work – yay!

Use a directly attached USB keyboard when the wireless Apple Keyboard stops working

This one is self-explanatory. My Apple wireless keyboard didn’t work in Windows.

I thought I’d just need to l

Install Boot Camp For Mac Mojave