Select the ISO with your Windows of choice ‘exit’ (this exits the windows partitioning shell)Ĭonnect the USB 3.0 drive to the PC with WinToUSB installed on it. ‘format fs=ntfs quick label=Windows’ (this formats the Windows partition and labels it as “Windows” (or whatever you want it to say) which is what OS X will see) ‘create partition primary’ (this uses the rest of your free space to create a usable partition) ‘create partition msr size=128′ (this creates a Windows required reserved partition) ‘format fs=fat32′ (this formats the EFI partition as fat32 so that Windows can write to it) ‘create partition efi size=200′ (this creates the efi partition where the bootloader will live) ‘convert gpt’ (this converts your hard drive from an MBR partition table to a GUID partition table) ‘select Disk 1′ (you will see the command prompt say that disk is now the selected disk) (We will call the correct drive ‘Disk 1′ for keeping the rest of the instructions clearer.) You want to make sure you don’t select your Mac’s main HDD or the USB thumb drive for the next step. ‘list disk’ to list all the drives available. ‘diskpart’ (this puts you into the windows partitioning shell) Type the following commands, excluding the ‘ ‘ around the commands (partially acquired from here): The objective here is to setup the USB 3 drive that you intend to install Windows on so that it will have an EFI partition, the Windows required reserved partition, and free disk space for the install. At the startup screen, run the command prompt by hitting Shift+F10. Option 2: If you created a bootable USB install drive with Boot Camp and want to use that instead of the Windows PC or virtual machine, boot the Boot Camp created Windows install USB drive by holding Option at reboot of your Mac and selecting the USB drive (called EFI Boot). This is all you will use Boot Camp to do.įor the Boot Camp options, leave the box checked that says “Download the latest Windows support software from Apple.” Uncheck “Install Windows 7 or later version.”

Do not leave anything important on them.įor best results, use Boot Camp utility to create your thumb drive with Mac drivers. Your USB thumb drive and target drive for Windows will be erased during this process. This isn’t documented anywhere online that I could find, so I decided to put it out there for others to use.Īccess to a PC or virtual machine running Windows for the use of WinToUSB and the Command Prompt (as of the writing of this How–To, this is the easiest and fastest way to do this.)Ī USB 3.0/3.1 drive (recommended over 2.0 for speed, and can have other I/O options like Thunderbolt, but USB is necessary for the WinToUSB software). I put several peoples ideas together from various tech workarounds to make this possible.

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