Installing Windows on a Mac with a damaged SuperDrive

Hi,

I recently had a problem with installing Windows on my iMac 21.5" (Mid-2011), I decided I'll make a tutorial, maybe someone else will find it useful.

This is rather a tutorial for advanced users, you should be very careful when following these steps. There's always a risk of damaging OS X installation.

Sorry for the lack of screenshots.

My SuperDrive was damaged and it was ejecting each DVD.

What hasn't worked for me:

1. Making a bootable flash drive with Windows installer on a Windows PC and trying to boot from it using rEFIt.
2. Modifying the plist file of Boot Camp Assistant to force it to boot Windows installer from USB. (since my Mac doesn't support USB boot)
3. Creating a Parallels VM with Boot Camp partition added as a hard disk, trying to format the partition as NTFS and copying files from Windows installation DVD to it.

Required things:
- Windows 8.1 x64 ISO or DVD (Windows 8 or Windows 7 should work too)
- rEFIt (rEFInd should work too)
- Tuxera NTFS
- Winclone
- Windows PC

1. Make a bootable flash drive with Windows setup. No, we won't use it to boot, but it must be a bootable one. There are many tutorials how to do this.

Don't use Boot Camp Assistant to make it! It must have NTFS file system, Boot Camp will format it to FAT32.

You should run command prompt as administrator. Then type the following commands:

diskpart
list disk (now you'll get a disk list. You must find your flash drive)
select disk X (replace X with the flash drive number)
clean
create partition primary
select partition 1
active
format fs=ntfs (not fat32!)
assign
exit

Go to your installation DVD using "cd" command. Please cd to the boot folder and write:

bootsect.exe /nt60 X:

(replace X with the flash drive letter)

If you have an ISO file, you can extract it using WinRAR.
Why not 7-Zip ? I found out 7-Zip extracts each file from ISO with capitalized names. No idea why it does this, maybe it was caused by my ISO. I suspect the installation would be done sucessfully anyway, but I would recommend to use WinRAR.

Now please go to your DVD/ISO and copy all files to the flash drive.

2. Make a Windows partition using the Disk Utility, I would give at least 100 GB. Format it to NTFS (you must have Tuxera NTFS to see this option). Don't use Boot Camp Assistant to make it because it formats to FAT32.
Uninstall Tuxera NTFS after doing this, you can do it in the System Preferences.

3. Plug in your flash drive into your Mac and run Winclone. Make an image from the USB, it might take several minutes. Once it's done restore the USB image into your Windows partition. If Winclone asks if it should replace your BCD file, click "Don't replace BCD file".

4. After installing rEFIt reboot twice. You should see the boot manager. Select the Windows logo. Make sure you select the Windows partition on your hard disk, not on the flash drive. The Windows installation should start. You do everything like on a normal PC, but you don't format the Windows partition! You don't need to do it since Tuxera NTFS already formatted it. The installer is running from the same partition, guess what would happen after you tried to format it.

5. After the first reboot during the installation you must select the Windows logo again. You'll see Windows boot manager then - it will say you have two systems installed: "Windows" and "Windows Setup". You must select Windows, not the setup although you actually install Windows! I don't know if this occurs on Windows 7 too. The installation should continue. You must select Windows after each reboot.

6. Windows will continue asking you to select the system each time you boot it. To fix it, you should press CMD + R (CMD works like Windows button) and type "msconfig". Click the Bootup tab and remove the Windows Setup item.

7. Install Boot Camp drivers. You need to download them from Apple's site using another computer and install from a USB drive. If you tried to install Windows 8.1 (probably Windows 8 too), you should also have internet access without the need to install the drivers. Then you can download them directly on your Mac. Note: Boot Camp contains also other drivers than WiFi, so it should be installed anyway.

Thanks for reading, I hope it will work for you.

Let me know if you encountered any issues with this.

 

Edit: fixed some grammar errors.