Do You Actually Need to Use Boot Camp? RELATED: Before you install Windows, stop and think about whether or not Boot Camp is the best choice for your needs. There are a couple of drawbacks to consider. When you use Boot Camp to install Windows on your Mac, you’ll need to re-partition your drive, which is going to take up quite a bit of your available drive space. Since storage on a Mac is fairly expensive, it’s something you should really think about. In addition, you’ll need to reboot every time you want to use Windows, and reboot again when you want to switch back to macOS. The benefit of Boot Camp, of course, is that you’re running Windows directly on the hardware, so it’ll be a lot faster than a virtual machine.
If you're in Windows, you can switch to the Mac OS X partition using the Boot Camp icon in the System Tray. Click the gray diamond-shaped icon, and click. Oct 16, 2018 - Follow these steps to boot into macOS or Windows: Restart your Mac, then immediately hold down the Option key. Release the Option key when you see the Startup Manager window. Select your macOS or Windows startup disk, then click the arrow or press Return.
If all you need to do is run a few Windows applications on your Mac, and those applications don’t a lot of resources (like 3D games), you might consider using a virtual machine like (there’s a free trial), or to run that software instead. The vast majority of the time you don’t actually need to use Boot Camp, and you’d be better off using a virtual machine. If, however, you’re looking to play Windows games on your Mac, Boot Camp might be a good choice. RELATED: For most people, though,. It’s something we use at How-To Geek every single day for testing software and running Windows. The integration with macOS amazingly well done, and the speed blows away Virtualbox. In the long run, the price is well worth it. You can even use Parallels to load your Boot Camp partition as a virtual machine while you are in macOS, giving you the best of both worlds.
What Version of Windows Can I Run? Which version of Windows you can run depends on your Mac: recent models support only Windows 10, while some older Macs only work with older versions of Windows. Here’s a quick outline, along with links to Apple’s official lists of supported models. Windows 10 is supported on.
Windows 8.1 is supported on most, with some exceptions. Windows 7 is supported, for the most part, and you’ll need an even older Mac to run Windows Vista or XP. Note that Macs can only run 64-bit, non-Enterprise versions of Windows.
RELATED: To install Windows, you’ll need an ISO file of the installer. You can if you already have a product key, though. If you’re installing Windows 7, you’ll also need a USB drive at least 16GB in size for the installer and drivers. Windows 8.1 and Windows 10 do not any external drive for installation. How to Install Windows on Your Mac Ready to install Windows? It’s probably a good idea to before getting started, just in case. Odds are nothing will go wrong, but any time you’re partitioning things there’s always a chance. Done? Let’s get started. You’ll use the Boot Camp Assistant application that comes on your Mac.
Open it by pressing Command+Space, typing Boot Camp, and pressing Enter. The Boot Camp Assistant will walk you through partitioning, downloading drivers, and starting the installer for you. Click “Continue” and you’ll be asked which ISO file you’d like to use and how big you’d like your Windows partition to be.
RELATED: How you should allocate the space depends on how much space you want for your Windows system and how much space you want for your macOS system. If you want to resize your partitions after this process, you’ll need to use a third-party tool, so choose carefully now. Note that, if you’re installing Windows 7, the order here is slightly different: Boot Camp will first guide you through setting up your installer USB disk, then ask you about partitioning. When you’re ready, click “Install” and Boot Camp will start downloading drivers, which it calls “Windows support software.” The installer will also partition your disk, copy the installer to that partition, and place the drivers so they’ll run after installation.
You can keep using your Mac while all this is running, though things will slow down a lot during the partitioning phase. Eventually, your Mac will reboot and you’ll see the standard Windows installer. Select the partition labeled BOOTCAMP if asked—do not install to any other partition, or you might end up removing macOS and losing all your data. (You did back up, right?) Windows will now finish installing normally. The Windows on-boarding process might ask you to connect to the Internet, but you won’t be able to do this without drivers: just skip these steps until you get to your desktop, at which point the Boot Camp installer will appear.
Proceed with the installer to set up your drivers, and you should be all set! How to Boot Into Windows On Your Mac By default, your Mac will still boot to macOS. To access Windows, you need to turn off your Mac, then turn it on while holding the Option key. You’ll be asked which drive you’d like to boot from. If you’d like to boot to Windows by default, you set this, or using the Boot Camp Control Panel in Windows. You’ll find this in your system tray after installing Windows, though you may have to click the Up arrow to find it. This control panel allows you to choose the default operating system your Mac boots to, as well as tweak keyboard and trackpad settings. While in Windows, the functions as the Windows key, while the Option key functions as the Alt key.
If you have a Touch Bar, you’ll see a complete set of buttons, similar to the Extended Control Strip in macOS. To see the function keys (F1, F2, etc.) simply hold down the Fn key. There’s no way to make this the default in Windows. How to Remove Windows From Your Mac If you want to remove Windows from your Mac and free up space, reboot into macOS and open the Boot Camp Assistant again.
You’ll see the Restore Disk to a Single Volume option. Boot Camp Assistant will automatically remove Windows and expand the macOS partition for you, reclaiming all of that space. Warning: This will delete all the files on your Windows partition, so be sure you have backup copies first!
To troubleshoot an issue with Windows 10 (especially boot-related issues), it can be handy to boot to Windows 10 that is not installed on a Boot Camp partition. It is relatively straightforward to create a bootable USB Flash drive to boot to the Windows 10 installer, and then open up a DOS prompt for troubleshooting.
What is needed. USB Flash drive (8 GB or larger recommended).
Windows 10 Installer ISO for Windows 10 Preparation All the preparation is done in macOS on the Mac that is having an issue booting Windows. It is important to use this Mac since it will be used to identify the correct Windows drivers. USB Flash Drive The USB Flash drive must be formatted as exFAT. Insert an 8GB or larger flash drive into a USB port on the Mac.
In Disk Utility, format the Flash drive as exFAT. Quit Disk Utility after this operation completes. Boot Camp Driver Open Boot Camp Assistant in the Utilities folder, and download the current Windows Support Software from the Action menu. Save the Windows Support Software to your desktop or other location, but do not save directly to the USB Flash Drive.
Windows Install Media Download the current install media from the Microsoft website. Windows is not going to be installed, but the install media will give access to the command line tools in Windows. Select the version of Windows that is closes to the version of Windows installed on the Mac (Windows 8, Windows 10). It does not matter what edition of Windows is used since Windows is not going to be installed. Create Recovery USB Flash Drive To create the USB Flash drive, follow these steps:.
Mount the Windows ISO that was downloaded from Microsoft. To mount the ISO, double click on the ISO in the Finder. Drag all the files and folders from the mounted ISO to the USB Flash Drive.
Drag the contents of the Windows Support Software to the USB Flash Drive. If there is not an AutoUnattend.xml at the top level of the drive (as shown below), download, unzip it, and add it to the drive. AutoUnattend.xml provides the location of the $WinPEDriver$ folder to load the drivers during boot. The 2018 MacBook Air (and potentially Macs after that) have cannot load the IntelMEI driver and give a “Windows Setup could not install one or more boot-critical drivers. To install Windows, make sure that the drivers are valid, and restart the installation”.
On the USB Flash drive, open the $WinPEDriver$ and remove the IntelMEI folder. Once the Flash drive has been created, it should look like this: The $WinPEDriver$ folder is important because the $WinPEDriver$ folder contains the drivers for Windows to boot successfully from the USB Flash drive and the hardware on that Mac. Boot from the USB Flash drive To inject the drivers, the Mac must be booted from the USB Flash drive.
Insert the USB Flash drive into an available USB port on the Mac. Reboot while holding the option key. Select EFI volume in the startup selector. If Windows does not boot from the USB Flash drive after showing the Windows logo, you may have to run the following command to tell the firmware to boot the windows installer from the USB flash drive. This has been observed on the late-2014 Mac Mini but may affect other models as well. To set the variable:. by booting to the recovery partition.
Boot back to macOS and open Terminal. Run the follow command and enter the admin password when prompted: sudo nvram InstallWindowsUEFI=1 Insert the USB flash drive if it is not inserted, reboot, and select the EFI volume from the startup selector. Note the InstallWindowsUEFI variable is cleared at each reboot, so you will to set it again if you do not select the USB Flash Drive.
Command Prompt and Mapped Drives When Windows 10 starts up, it will prompt for installation of Windows 10. To open up a DOS window, press Fn-Shift-F10 (or just shift-F10) or click Repair Computer-Troubleshoot-Command Prompt (if available). Once in the command prompt, there are usually 3 drive letters available: X, C, and D. X: This is Windows that you are booted into in memory.
The files from the boot.wim on the flash drive are copied to memory and then booted to. C: Boot Camp partition. D: The USB Flash drive Running Utilities Within the Windows command prompt, you can run utilities on the Boot Camp partition.