TUTORIAL: Installing Windows 8 on a Mac

By ingramator
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ingramator

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Installing Windows 8 on a Mac: A comprehensive guide

Bootcamp and Intro:

The word Bootcamp is not being used correctly around here. MacOSX you find the bootcamp assistant, all this is is a partitioning tool, nothing more. The real use of Bootcamp is for the drivers required for Windows, in particular the Apple manufactured parts such as the touchpad. Bootcamp drivers are awful, really awful and Apple has them so poorly written that they hinder performance and in particular, battery life (thats why you will see all these "side by side"s tests on youtube claiming Macs have greater battery life when really its the bootcamp drivers and services chewing it up). My honest advice, sell your current Mac and go for a straight out Windows 8 optimized PC, if you like touch or think you may use it then go for a kinda hybrid setup!! If you're still keen on using an Apple product :shiftyninja: :laugh: or for some very obscure reason OSX is a requirement for you then I will give you some pointers on what to do, as I have done it all and know what works best!!

Tips:

  • Never ever single boot Windows, at start-up EFI will search for an OSX volume and only after it has scanned the whole disk will it decide to search for another suitable OS, in your case, Windows 8. This can be a real annoyance as it adds a good 20-30 seconds to boot and restart.
  • Don't try and multi-boot. I have had OSX, Linux and Windows all at once and you are bound to run into problems at one stage with the disks or an OS corrupting/not being able to start
  • You can't run two versions of Windows, so don't try and run Win8 win Win7
  • If you rarely use MacOSX or just want their "in case" you need it, remove all the language files, uninstall any unnecessary (to you that is) crap like iLife etc. to make room for your new Windows partition :D
  • Select your default start up OS from OSX to Windows 8 (or bootcamp control panel... if you have it installed :p) or if you frequently change OSes and don't want to have to keep holding in option key at boot then consider setting up rEFIt: http://refit.sourceforge.net/ it will give you a nice interface at start-up for OS selection which can be a lot less work
  • Don't expect things to work like they do on a normal PC, your working at a second rate standard and as I said before it is absolutely no replacement for a real PC :p

How to do it:

  • Remove any unnecessary crap from your hard drive or back it up for transfer to Windows later (better to have it on NTFS than HFS)
  • Run bootcamp assistant and partition your hard drive to your desired size allocations
  • If you're installing Windows 8 you're going to need the Bootcamp 4.0 drivers, in the assistant it will have an option to download them, last I checked, those servers were dead and it was pretty much impossible to download them, so PM me if you need a copy :p
  • Restart your Mac, when the power comes back on hold the option/alt key at the chime screen (goes gray) and wait for the boot selector to come up
  • Insert you're Windows 8 OEM copy (if you have an upgrade version then you have to install windows 7 first then override it)
  • Select the Disc icon which should say Windows under it
  • Run through the setup till you hit the hard drive selector screen
  • Bootcamp assistant, being the novice software that it is, doesn't partion the hard drive as NTFS so go ahead and click advanced then format it
  • Install to that partition and continue on through the setup until everything is done and your at the start screen
  • As you will see Windows 8 has actually got drivers that are working for most of the OS ie screen, keyboard and likely mouse/trackpad
  • NOW, this is where the fun begins :p, you have 2 options:

Option 1

  1. Install bootcamp drivers and services from the disc or USB by running setup (to eject the disk you can do it via file explorer or you can hold down 2 fingers at the chime or if you have a mouse then the secondary click)
  2. Restart your computer (hold option to now select the Windows 8 Drive) and then set your bootcamp control panel settings from the system control panel or tray icon such as tap to click etc.
  3. You will now be able to use the touchpad features like 2 finger horizontal scrolling and also altering brightness and volume (mind you the overlay won't come up nor will the now playing for the music app)
  4. HOWEVER you will not be operating at real speeds or have great battery life

Option 2

  1. Once Windows 8 is up and running go ahead and install the latest graphics and sound drivers (the stock Windows 8 ones are pretty good but if your attempting to game... :p then get the latest proper ones)
  2. If you have a trackpad and you want some awesome extra Windows 8 features go ahead and install touchpad ++ http://trackpad.powerplan7.com/ which gives you some seriously cool and powerful options unlike the stock and bootcamp ones, if your getting an error than you may need to install the bootcamp one first which is located in the bootcamp install folder/drivers/apple/AppleMultiTouchTrackPadInstaller.exe (64 bit is in the 64 folder)
  3. Change your Keyboard setting to English US (apple) and then everything should be mapped correctly ;)
  4. If you need brightness and volume control there are free programs on the web that can use them as hot keys to mimic that functionality just do a quick Bing search :p :p :p
  5. Enjoy closer to native speeds!!

Pros and Cons for bootcamp setup

Pros:

  • No extra work involves, should just work
  • Easy control panel options
  • Difficulty = Easy/Medium (depends if you encounter any problems)

Cons:

  • limited in what you can do (especially the trackpad)
  • TAXING ON PERFORMANCE AND BATTERY LIFE

Native drivers pros and cons:

Pros:

  • Significant increase in battery life and performance
  • Greater flexibility and options (write your own drivers like me :p)

Cons:

  • If your not good with trouble shooting and working with low level system features it could be a painful experience
  • You will miss out on some functionality and won't have one control panel to change everything
  • No simple update system
  • DIFFICULTY = HARD/EXPERT

The third option:

What I have going is a mixture of bootcamp drivers, native drivers, third party drivers and my own drivers/programs to make Windows 8 on a Mac an enjoyable experience. So feel free if your not going to install the whole bootcamp collection to pick and choose what you need/want and fill the gaps with other more stable drivers, the majority of important ones you won't find alternatives to (except of course touchpad with touch ++) are located in the /Drivers/Apple folder in the Bootcamp Drivers folder.

Conclusion:

Don't think for a second that your going to get the real Windows 8 experience but you will be getting one very close and with a few tweaks you won't even know the difference. If your raging because there are errors or somethings not working, don't give up, try different things and experiment so you gain a greater understanding of OS concepts. I also don't advise you take the virtual machine route because that will most likely end up being a painful and slow experience.

In regard to which option is the best, that's really personal preference, I, as noted, have mixes things up to try and make for a better Windows 8 setup and right now I'm pretty happy with it!! Still room for improvement of course :p If your a bit of a novice to these kinds of things I would go with option 1 and just get a feel for what things are like if you are feeling a bit more adventurous or up for a challenge/path of encountering problems then hit up option 2. What I will say is that you are likely to encounter a hiccup somewhere with option 2 so if all else fails just take option 1.

Support:

I may have left a couple of things out so feel free to add anything to the comments section, I will also keep you guys updated with the latest improvements or methods I find to make it a better experience. If you have any questions at all regarding this tutorial, bootcamp, or Windows 8 in general feel free to PM me and I'll get to you as soon as I can :)

Windows 8 is awesome!!

Ingramator

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Shadrack

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Thank you for the guide. I'm not sure I follow the line of reasoning that using a different driver for the trackpad will somehow increase performance in battery life. Seems that you would need something lower level than that would have better control over the Power Saving features of Windows 8. Could you please elaborate? I'm not convinced that following your procedure would yield better performance and battery life to be honest because I don't think that the trackpad and keyboard drivers were the problem.

Bootcamp assistant, being the novice software that it is, doesn't partion the hard drive as NTFS so go ahead and click advanced then format it

Microsoft hasn't even written a white paper on NTFS. NTFS is a completely closed door proprietary file system. Why would you expect Apple to include NTFS formatting as an option? Microsoft does not include HFS+ formatting as an option, for example.

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threetonesun

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  1. If you need brightness and volume control there are free programs on the web that can use them as hot keys to mimic that functionality just do a quick Bing search :p :p :p

Or you can just check the box in the boot camp options to use the keyboard mapped functions and hold the function key.

Also.. near native? It's a computer running Windows, it is native speed. I have Windows 8 running in boot camp and it's a good bit faster than OSX.

You might want to include a section on what to do if the boot camp partitioning guide fails, as it often does.

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#Michael

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I truly don't agree with this. I installed Win8 as the only OS on my 2009 MBP and while it adds a few extra seconds to boot time it hardly makes that a con. One thing that is a huge drawback though is that it would not see my trackpad after the install was finished. I had to connect a usb mouse and search the internet for drivers....took almost two hours to fix. I highly recommend using trackpad++.

Performance and battery life has been on-par with OS X Mountain Lion (approx 5 hours).

Your so called 'guide' sounds like something a fanboy would put together.

If you have the ability to do so I would take the time and go the more advanced/spine tingling route:

1. Backup your macbook pro into a bootable image

2. Boot from a win8 dvd and remove all partitions

3. Create a brand new win8 partition and install win8 as the only OS

4. Spent some quality time with it....you may actually be surprised with it

The worst that happens is that you don't like it and you apply your backup and you have your system back.

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kevpan815

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I tried a different method: 1. Since my copy of Windows 8 is the $39.99 Digital Copy from Microsoft.com, I first installed Windows 7 Ultimate Edition OEM from DVD (on Boot Camp) then I installed Boot Camp 4.0 from USB Drive, next I Installed Service Pack 1 for Windows 7, next I installed all available updates for SP1 for W7, next I ran the W8 Upgrade Adviser, next I made my W8 Digital Copy Initial Purchase (with the $14.99 Back UP Disk which just Shipped Today) on to W7 SP1, finally I installed W8 as an Upgrade on top of W7 SP1. Boot Camp worked just fine after install with out needing to reinstall it.

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ingramator

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Or you can just check the box in the boot camp options to use the keyboard mapped functions and hold the function key.

Also.. near native? It's a computer running Windows, it is native speed. I have Windows 8 running in boot camp and it's a good bit faster than OSX.

You might want to include a section on what to do if the boot camp partitioning guide fails, as it often does.

I'm not going to go into details but you are not going to get native speeds on a mac with any operating system other than OSX. A major part of this is of course is Bootcamp but there are many other reasons such as how other OSes are allowed to access the CPU, RAM and other components because of the missing BIOS

I truly don't agree with this. I installed Win8 as the only OS on my 2009 MBP and while it adds a few extra seconds to boot time it hardly makes that a con. One thing that is a huge drawback though is that it would not see my trackpad after the install was finished. I had to connect a usb mouse and search the internet for drivers....took almost two hours to fix. I highly recommend using trackpad++.

Performance and battery life has been on-par with OS X Mountain Lion (approx 5 hours).

Your so called 'guide' sounds like something a fanboy would put together.

If you have the ability to do so I would take the time and go the more advanced/spine tingling route:

1. Backup your macbook pro into a bootable image

2. Boot from a win8 dvd and remove all partitions

3. Create a brand new win8 partition and install win8 as the only OS

4. Spent some quality time with it....you may actually be surprised with it

The worst that happens is that you don't like it and you apply your backup and you have your system back.

Fanboy of what? I use all operating systems, from Windows to OSX then over to Solaris :) Battery life is definitely not on par, try comparing a similar laptop and you find Windows 8 on a PC completely outlives Windows 8 on a Mac. Neither is performance, try doing some benchmarking!

Took me a lot of time to draft up :(

I tried a different method: 1. Since my copy of Windows 8 is the $39.99 Digital Copy from Microsoft.com, I first installed Windows 7 Ultimate Edition OEM from DVD (on Boot Camp) then I installed Boot Camp 4.0 from USB Drive, next I Installed Service Pack 1 for Windows 7, next I installed all available updates for SP1 for W7, next I ran the W8 Upgrade Adviser, next I made my W8 Digital Copy Initial Purchase (with the $14.99 Back UP Disk which just Shipped Today) on to W7 SP1, finally I installed W8 as an Upgrade on top of W7 SP1. Boot Camp worked just fine after install with out needing to reinstall it.

That will definitely work (most of the time) but my point is that there are alternatives and its good to know whats out there.

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threetonesun

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I'm not going to go into details but you are not going to get native speeds on a mac with any operating system other than OSX. A major part of this is of course is Bootcamp but there are many other reasons such as how other OSes are allowed to access the CPU, RAM and other components because of the missing BIOS

Please go into detail, because this isn't true.

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Eric Veteran

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Please go into detail, because this isn't true.

Yeah, that's totally off-base. Boot Camp is a partitioning program and GRUB front-end. Aside from some extra EFI modules Macs are just a standard computer.

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ingramator

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This could do without the opinions and emoticons. Besides, some points are simply not true.

Hey, thanks for the tips. Could you please tell me which parts aren't true?

Cheers

Great effort in the review/tutorial - I do believe some facts are needed rather than your opinion though.

Thanks for the advice! I'll keep opinion out of future posts!

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threetonesun

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I explicitly said that you don't need anything to do with Bootcamp.

You're missing the point, boot camp partitions, is a set of drivers / control panel for Windows, and is a boot loader. Once loaded, there's absolutely no difference running Windows on a Mac than running Windows on any other PC.

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xWhiplash

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You're missing the point, boot camp partitions, is a set of drivers / control panel for Windows, and is a boot loader. Once loaded, there's absolutely no difference running Windows on a Mac than running Windows on any other PC.

Exactly. I have found Windows 7 and 8 to have much better performance on my mac than OS X. They are installed on the same type of SSD (separate drives of course), and Windows seems to perform better.

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neufuse Veteran

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wont run at native speed? how much more native speed can you get then direct CPU access? its not like this is an emulation layer for the processor... the EFI BIOS compatability layer is just a wrapper... and Windows can even run as a native EFI system now too

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clay_tiller

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I'm sure the solution to my problem is somewhere in this thread, but I'm too much of a noob to see it.

Being forced by reasons not at issue here to run Windows on a late 2011 MacBookPro, with almost NO available disk space, I loaded Windows 8 on a LaCie external HD, using the instruction here:http://bleeptobleep.blogspot.fr/2013/02/mac-install-windows-7-or-8-on-external.html. The installation worked fine and Windows 8 runs as expected, EXCEPT it can't see any wireless network. I spent four hours talking to Windows support techs today. Should have looked at this site instead, since the techs had no I idea what the problem was. I'm convinced the problem is a missing driver after coming here.

However, I have no idea what driver I need, nor how to install it. I did not use Bootcamp for the installation, and have no idea if any of the information here is relevant. Remember, the reason I did not initially partition the MBP HD and use Bootcamp was that I have only about 15Gb disk space available. And no, it's my wife's laptop, my iMac is a long way away, and I cannot delete any of her soft/hardware.

Is my case hopeless?

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