Fusion drive imac windows

So this is step by step how I managed to install Windows 10 (1709) on the SSD part of a 2TB Fusion Drive in my iMac 5K 27-inch (late 2015).

I don’t know if this will work to all types of stock Fusion Drive setups on Apple products. This is what I wanted:

• iMac 5K 27-inch (late 2015) with 2TB Fusion Drive (120GB SSD + 2TB HDD)
• macOS 10.13.1 High Sierra installed on a Fusion Drive of 800GB consisting of 45GB of the SSD and 755GB of the HDD.
• Windows 10 (1709) installed on 75GB of the SSD
• 1,2TB on a separate exFAT partiton for sharing files between OSs.

Things to take into account (you can skip this. It’s only an explanation of why things are done in a specific order):

— YOU NEED TO ERASE ALL YOUR SYSTEM. PLEASE BACKUP.

— BEFORE DOING ANYTHING, DOWNLOAD WINDOWS COMPATIBILITY DRIVERS FROM BOOTCAMP ASSISTANT ON MACOS, AND SAVE THEM TO A USB DRIVE.

— macOS only permits to install Windows making a BOOTCAMP partition on the HDD.

— Windows doesn’t like macOS’s EFI partition structure

— Windows always tries to install on disk0 despite of you telling Windows to install on disk1.

— macOS doesn’t like the way Windows creates the EFI partition and refuses to install after Windows.

— Windows creates an EFI partition of 100MB but macOS needs 200MB minimum.

— Installing first macOS, separating a slice of the SDD from the Fusion Drive and trying to install Windows on it, doesn’t work because Windows doesn’t like macOS EFI partition.

— Spliting the Fusion Drive, erasing all disks, installing Windows normally, then reducing Window’s partition to make room for macOS and trying to install macOS doesn’t work because of the small Windows EFI partition.

— Of all the different tries I made, the only way I could manage to install Windows, was installing Windows first, without any operating system installed on my iMac.

Well, these are the STEPS that worked for me:

A. Split the Fusion Drive:

1.- Boot into Internet Recovery: Hold Command+Option+R till a spinning globe appears.

2.- Launch Utilities -> Terminal and type:

diskutil cs list

3.- Look for the Logical Volume Groupe ID (LVGID) at the top and Logical Volume ID (LVID) at the bottom part and type:

diskutil cs deleteVolume LVID

diskutil cs delete LVGID

Now you have your Fusion Drive splitted

B.- Boot into the Windows USB Installer.

1.- When the Windows Install Setup appears, press Shift+F10

2.- Type:

diskpart

list disk(check what drive is disk0 and what drive is disk 1. (For me: disk0 HDD, disk1 SSD)

select disk 0

clean (this deletes all the drive)

select disk 1

clean

3.- Now we are going to manually create the EFI partition that will solve all of our problems. Type:

select disk 1 (the SSD)

convert gpt

create partition efi size=200

format quick fs=FAT32 label=”EFI”

create partition msr size=128

exit

exit

4.- Now proceed with Windows Setup, selecting custom install and on the partition selection window:

— delete (if any) all of the disk0 (HDD) partitions

— delete (if any) all of the disk1 (SDD) partitions except EFI and MSR so you will have:

— 2TB unallocated space on disk0 (HDD)

— EFI partition on the SSD

— MSR partition on the SSD

— 112GB of unallocated space on disk1 (SDD)

— select the 112GB of unallocated space and click next. Windows should install.

C.- Upon booting into Windows:

1.- Install Bootcamp Compatibility Drivers and reboot. You’ll see that C: drives has been magically renamed to BOOTCAMP.

2.- Delete the MSR partition. macOS doesn’t like it. Open a CMD as administrator and type:

diskpart

list disk (look for the SSD disk number. For me it was disk1)

select disk 1

list partition (look for a 128MB MSR partition. For me it was partition2)

select partition 2

delete override

3.- Shrink the BOOTCAMP partition. Using Windows Disk Management, reduce the BOOTCAMP volume to 44000MB.

4.- Create a new exFAT formatted volume (name doesn’t matter, it’s only a placeholder) on the newly freed space but leaving 128MB out of it. So substract 128 to the number that Windows suggests you. macOS needs those 128MB of unallocated space there.

D.- Installing macOS 10.13.1

1.- Boot into Internet Recovery.

2.- Using Disk Utility format the exFAT volume we’ve created before as HFS+ named Macintosh HD.

3.- Using Disk Utility format the HDD with a single Macintosh HD HFS+ partition.

4.- Recreate the Fusion Drive. Open terminal and type:

diskutil list (look what disk is disk0 and what disk is disk1. For me SSD was disk1 and HDD was disk0. Look also for the identifier of the SDD Macintosh HD partition which for me was disk1s4 I think)

diskutil cs create disk1s4 disk0 (first SSD partition, second whole HDD. It will do its stuff and report a large number Logical Volume Group ID -LVGID-)

diskutil cs createVolume LVGID jhfs+ Macintosh\ HD 100%

5.- Done. Fusion Drive created. Install macOS on Macintosh HD.

E.- Post macOS install:

1.- With Disk Utility, create a new exFAT partition on the Fusion Drive, size 1.2TB called WinMac that will be used to share files between OSs. The partition will be created out of the Fusion Drive and on the HDD.

An that’s all. That’s how I managed to get Windows installed on a portion of my SDD and keep the Fusion Drive for macOS, while also having a separate partition for file sharing.

All works correctly, but I have only experienced one ‘issue’:

— Bootcamp Control Panel on Windows shows three startup drives: MacOS X, disk1 Windows, and Microsoft Basic Data Windows

— macOS Startup Disk Preferences shows two: Macintosh HD — MacOS X, and BOOTCAMP-Windows.

— If you select MacOS X whether on Windows Bootcamp Control Panel or macOS Startup Disk Preferences, computer will always boot into macOS.

— In you select disk1 Windows on Bootcamp Control Panel on Windows, system will always boot into macOS.

— If you select Microsoft Basic Data Windows on Bootcamp control panel on Windows, system will always boot into Windows.

— If you select Windows on Startup disk on macOS, system will always boot into Windows, BUT Windows won’t recognize the HDD (and so the WinMac partitition) and show an error on a SATA/EHCI.

— Booting Windows using Alt-Option at startup always shows the HDD.

So to avoid the driver error and the HDD not being recognized I have to:

— If I have macOS set as default os: boot into Windows by pressing Alt-Option at startup. Selecting Windows on macOS and rebooting, means HDD won’t be recognized.

— If I want to set Windows as default os: I do it from Windows, selecting the ‘Microsoft Basic Data – Windows’ disk on Bootcamp Control Panel on Windows. After that, Windows will always boot recognizing the HDD.

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.”

(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.

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.

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:

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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 load the Bootcamp drivers to fix that but – not so fast! (see the next issue, below).

Meantime I just switched to a wired keyboard – ironically the one I found in my storage room was a genuine Microsoft branded one with lots of useful extra function keys on it.

I’ve been perfectly happy to just stay with that – especially noting the next issue.

Remove/Rename a magic driver file to avoid Bootcamp support causing a Windows “WDF Violation” Blue-Screen-Of-Death a minute or so after Windows boots

Well, with Windows ‘up’, I installed the Bootcamp mac hardware support drivers. This is important for all sorts of reasons (including WiFi not working until you do).

I did that by selecting the (still mounted/attached) USB installer stick and running ‘Setup’.

The installation of drivers worked fine.

What didn’t come out fine was the unintended consequence.

Once the Bootcamp hardware support was installed, Windows started crashing a minute or so after each boot up, with a “WDF Violation”.

You can log in and start working – just – and then ‘bang!’ – sad/dead windows:

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After everything else (and one and a half days of this stuff) – this was really frustrating.

Cue yet more googling – and at least this one seemed to be an ‘understood’ issue.

It appears to the the case that the wrong version of a crucial driver file (keyboard support related, by the looks of it) is loaded in by Bootcamp, but when installing onto this particular generation of iMacs.

Yay.

The fix – after I found it – involves booting Windows in diagnostic mode and disabling that driver file.

Even getting into that diagnostic mode is a challenge… it turns out that you don’t reboot holding down the shift key for ‘safe mode’ in Windows any more – that would too easy…

…Instead, now you boot up and then select restart… and while doing that restart, you hold down the shift key.  You then wind up with the opportunity, during the reboot, to access diagnostic functions.

Sure, that’s obvious… not.

Anyway – once booted in diagnostic mode, select to bring up a ‘DOS’ command window.

Now select drive C: and then locate and rename (or delete) the errant driver file concerned  (C:\Windows\System32\Drivers\MACHALDRIVER.SYS) as per this screen shot:

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One trap to watch out for: Make sure you’ve changed to drive C:, and that you’re not still on drive ‘X:’ looking for that file.

That drive – which you start out on when bringing up the command window – contains a whole separate copy of Windows…without the bootcamp files on it. So you think you’re searching in the right filesystem – after all, Windows is on it… but you aren’t.

I guess that’s a consequence of using the Diagnostic mode, but it fooled me for a while, as I was trying to find the errant driver file there (on drive ‘X:’) at first…and failing to do so.

Now reboot and – yay – no more WDF blue-screen-of-death failures.

… but also, no bluetooth keyboard support.

No problem to me – I really prefer the direct-attach larger keyboard I found with all the Microsoft specific buttons on it anyway, for this task.

Contrary to warnings on the web sites that had helpfully pointed out the incorrect/broken MACHALDRIVER.SYS file issue, I have had no practical issues with volume control or similar things as a consequence of disabling that file.

For me, it all seems to work fine without this file in my life at all.

Success!

At this point, I have a working Windows 10 installation on my machine.

I have subsequently installed the software I wanted to run in the first place and its all working just fine.

I do hope someone else finds this useful – and that if you do go down this road, that you have a smoother ride than I did! 🙂

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У многих владельцев Mac часто возникает необходимость в операционной системе Windows. Одним она нужна для запуска любимых игр, вторым – для работы специализированного ПО, а третьим просто для разнообразия.

Мы решили напомнить, как правильно и быстро произвести установку Windows 10 на Mac, чтобы не связываться с виртуальными машинами и подобными решениями, которые не позволяют стабильно работать в Windows и выжимать максимум из возможностей компьютера.

На какие компьютеры Mac можно установить Windows 10

Официально 64-разрядную Windows 10 Home или Pro при помощи утилиты Boot Camp можно установить на следующие модели:

• MacBook Pro/Air (2012 и новее)
• MacBook (2015 и новее)
• iMac/Mac mini (2012 и новее)
• iMac Pro (2017)
• Mac Pro (конец 2013 г.)

Существует лишь одно ограничение: при использовании macOS Mojave не получится установить ОС Windows через Boot Camp на iMac с жестким диском емкостью 3 ТБ.

Это обусловлено особенностями совмещения разных файловых систем APFS и NTFS на накопителях такой емкости. Подробнее об этом можно узнать на сайте Apple.

Остальные модели без проблем поддерживают установку Windows 10 прямо из коробки.

Что нам понадобится

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1. Свободное место на накопителе. Минимальный объем для установки 64 ГБ, а рекомендуемый – 128 ГБ.

На практике можно обойтись и меньшим объемом, но всегда есть вероятность нехватки пространства для нормальной работы системы или установки необходимого ПО.

2. Для настольных компьютеров потребуется клавиатура и манипулятор, чтобы постоянно не переподключать их в разных ОС. Это может быть как проводное решение, так и сторонние модели, которые имеют несколько каналов для сопряжения с несколькими девайсами.

3. USB-накопитель на 16 Гб или более емкий. Такой диск не потребуется владельцам компьютеров 2015 года выпуска либо более новым.

4. Образ установочного диска Microsoft Windows (ISO) или установочный носитель данной операционной системой. Скачать образ можно на сайте Microsoft.

5. Пользоваться Windows 10 можно бесплатно в течение 30 дней с момента установки. После этого понадобится купить ключ активации. Сделать это можно в практически любом российском магазине, либо в интернете. На официальном сайте Microsoft он стоит приличные $199 или 13 тыс. рублей.

Средняя цена ключа в России – около 3 тыс. рублей, хотя попадаются предложения и дешевле на свой страх и риск.

Как установить Windows 10 по шагам

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1. Запустите утилиту Boot Camp через поиск Spotlight, Finder или Launchpad.

2. Укажите программе путь к загруженному образу и выберите, сколько места на установленном накопителе выделить для установки Windows.

Хорошенько подумайте на данном этапе, ведь изменить используемый раздел без переустановки Widows не получится. Если планируете играть в игры или запускать тяжелые приложения, лучше сразу выделите больше места.

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3. Дождитесь загрузки необходимых драйверов и данных из сети. После скачивания и перезагрузки компьютера начнется установка Windows 10.

4. Мастер установки попросит произвести базовые настройки и указать раздел, на который следует поставить Windows. Он уже будут назван BOOTCAMP.

5. После окончания установки потребуется произвести окончательную настройку параметров системы.

6. Оказавшись на рабочем столе Windows потребуется запустить утилиту Boot Camp. Она будет храниться на системном диске либо на съемном накопителе, который был создан на этапе подготовки.

7. После установки всех компонентов и перезагрузки Windows нужно подключиться к сети через Wi-Fi или по кабелю и запустить Apple Software Update из панели Пуск.

8. В программе следует указать все доступные обновления. Установить из и перезапустить компьютер.

Как запускать macOS или Windows

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Теперь при запуске компьютера автоматически будет стартовать операционная система macOS, а при удержании клавиши Alt/Option увидите меню с выбором раздела для загрузки.

Для быстрого перехода из Windows в macOS можно воспользоваться утилитой в трее (правом нижнем углу), которая позволяет в одно нажатие перезапустить компьютер с другой ОС.

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Для обратного перехода следует перейти в Системные настройки – Загрузочный том, ввести пароль разблокировки настроек и выбрать раздел с Windows для загрузки.

Как удалить Windows с Mac

Для удаления достаточно запустить Дисковую утилиту и стереть в ней раздел, который был отведен для Boot Camp с Windows. Затем расширьте основной раздел за счет освободившегося пространства.

Желаем удачи!

(45 голосов, общий рейтинг: 4.51 из 5)

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iPhones.ru

Делаем все быстро и без ошибок.

My machine at work is a late 2015 model iMac, bought in August 2016. It’s got a decent spec. The main bits, 3.3GHz i7 processor, 16GB RAM and 1TB Fusion Drive. That should definitely cover my requirements for development work, shouldn’t it?

I spend 99.9% of my time in Windows. Due to my machine having 16GB RAM (which is what I want Windows to have to help out with memory hungry apps like Chrome, Slack and Visual Studio), it’s an easy decision to install Windows in a Bootcamp partition rather than on a VM where I would have to share resources with OSX.

Fairly quickly after getting my iMac set up, I noticed that it was a bit slow in Windows. For quite a while I just put this down to me being spoiled by the SSD in my Macbook Pro that I use at home. As the months have gone on and the requirements for my work have gotten more intense, it’s started to get to the point where I often find it unusable. I tend not to shut my machine down, instead just putting it to sleep. After a week of this, it takes around 25 minutes to close everything, reboot and open everything back up again. Even it it’s only been on for one day, it can still take 12 to 20 minutes.

I booted into OSX recently for the first time in around 11 months and noticed it was running much quicker, close to the performance of OSX on my own Macbook Pro. I decided it was time to research and finally I found the reason why I regularly want to throw my machine out of the window I sit next to.

When you install Windows on a Bootcamp partition on a Fusion Drive, Boot Camp Assistant creates the Windows partition on the disk drive, not the SSD.

And here it is straight from Apple — https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT201456 — see the 8th FAQ down (at the time of writing).

In a way, I’m happy because I at least know that it’s not just me being impatient! I’m also a bit annoyed with myself though. Firstly for not doing any research into how exactly a Fusion Drive works before we went into the Apple Store to buy the machine, and also for not just registering that the Fusion Drive is an Apple concept so probably doesn’t work elsewhere.

So hopefully someone finds this because they’re doing what I should have done, research!

My personal opinion, if you’re thinking of installing Windows in a Bootcamp partition on a Fusion Drive for full time dev work (or anything moderately intensive), don’t do it. Go for the SSD. It runs like a dream on my Macbook Pro! Alternatively, if you really want to/don’t have a choice and go for the Fusion Drive, the new model 21″ iMac (and the 27″ iMac) can have up to 32GB RAM now. I have tried Windows in a Parallels VM on the Fusion Drive and it does run better than it does in Bootcamp. So if you do go for a Fusion Drive, also go for 32GB of RAM and run Windows in a VM rather that on a Bootcamp partition.

This was originally posted on my blog in June 2017