As title says it I was given the task to resurrect an iMac and put it back in business! 🙂
Unlike Microsoft, Apple are very picky on how you gonna use your computer and are unpleasantly pushy on dragging you to buy more of their stuff. Simply said as some of you may already know you can not use old, but quite descent hardware wise Mac with Apple’s latest OS due to firmware restrictions. Luckily you can still make some use of it with Windows or Linux.
The iMac in question had a faulty hard drive, which luckily was not too difficult to replace. But as usual the troubles came soon after! 🙂
With a freshly burned DVD with Windows 10 x64 a thought I will be quickly in the game, but NO – got stuck with a black screen and a message to pick the boot type and irresponsive keyboard! It turns out though the computer is 64 bit architecture its EFI is 32 bit and you have no chance to boot it from Windows 10 installation media…
I had a similar problem. I installed boot camp on my late 2012 iMac using a windows 7 DVD in an external usb drive. Windows seemed to install successfully, but after trying to reboot into windows I got the command line screen with 'Boot failed. Press any key to enter command line.' The solution is as follows: 1.Boot with the windows 7 install. Hey all, Been trying to install Windows 7 on my imac – 2 years old. Recently installed Snow Leopard. Using Boot Camp – Go through the process – it instals to a point where I get a black screen with choices to restart in safe mode etc. Have not yet been asked for magic numbers Can not get past this window to finish installation.
Thanks to good and clever people online help is available! I read this post, downloaded the exe file provided and it all went well!
As the steps I took are slightly different I wanted to have a note of it.
First of course you will need the Windows 10 x64 image file, which you can download from Microsoft. Under Windows 10 with right click on the file select “Mount”.
Install Windows 7 On Imac
- Connect an external USB drive or insert a flash drive into the USB port on your Mac; keep it connected or inserted while you install Windows and the Windows support software. On your Mac, open Boot Camp Assistant, located in /Applications/Utilities.
- A 32-bit version of Windows 7 will work with an iMac or MacBook Pro launched in 2007 or later, and any Intel-based Mac Pro, MacBook, or Mac mini. The 64-bit version of Windows 7 will work with Mac Pro or MacBook Pro launched in 2008 or later, and any iMac or MacBook, introduced in 2009 or later. If you do not have Boot Camp 3.1, go to the Apple.
- We did a fresh install of High Sierra on the first 3TB drive. The goal was to install Windows 7 on the second 3TB drive. The third 3TB drive was to be added to the macOS installation as a data disk. To install Windows 7 on this old Mac Pro, the drive needs to be formatted with a MBR partition scheme.
Just to make life organised create a folder with a name of your choice, in my case it was “NewISO”.
Install Windows 7 On Mac Mini
Install Windows 7 On Windows 10 Computer
Run Command Prompt as administrator and navigate to where you have the OSCDIMG.EXE file saved /or just type the full path to it/.
oscdimg -n -m -bf:bootetfsboot.com f: c:NewISOwin10_efi32.iso
where f is the drive letter where the image file is mounted.
Install New Windows 7
Windows 7 Install Pc
After this you will have e 64 bit Windows 10 image file with 32 bit EFI, do not worry about the warning message related to NT 3.5, just burn it on DVD or USB stick and use it.
Install Windows 7 On Mac Mini Usb
Final words – I do not quite know how this program, which is a Microsoft genuine tool, manages to change the boot loader. I would advice you to download it from the post link above or at least make sure you use the same version, which is 2.54, as this may have something to do with the success of the procedure and a newer one may just put back 64 bit EFI again. I will be glad if someone more knowledgeable explains it in detail.