Follow Apple’s instructions there to use Bootcamp. Using BootcampĪpple did a great job of documenting the procedure So I had to format the drive as shown before so I could reinstall the Mac OS X.Īll this to show that installing Windows on a Mac without Bootcamp is an unnecessarily cumbersome activity that should be avoided. I had to reformat the hard drive because without the reformatting, it would not even show up as an option during Mac installation. Meanwhile, I messed up the original Mac OS X installation while trying to install Windows and had to reformat the entire drive and reinstall the Mac OS: I tried to fix this from command line but it was a lot of hassle and should be avoided: I could not even format the unallocated space into NTFS.

It did not install even when I deleted the partition so I had plenty of unallocated space. For example, when I tried to boot my Macbook Pro off of a USB drive containing Windows installation, it got to the installation screen but then would not let me install Windows on the disk as shown below. Unnecessarily long process and using Bootcamp is recommended. Installing Windows and the relevant boot configuring without Bootcamp can be a painful and Bootcamp is Apple’s native utility for installing Windows on a Mac. Bootcamp: To Use or Not to Use?ĭefinitely use Bootcamp. But the process itself can get convoluted and there are some pitfalls to be avoided so I decided to document it here. I’ve installed Windows 7 on a 2011 iMac without a problem so this procedure should work at least as far back as 2011 Macs in my personal experience. Installing Windows on a Mac may or may or may not go smooth depending on how old the Mac is. On a PC, I would usually dual boot Windows and Linux, and on a Mac, I usually dual boot Mac OS X and Windows. I like dual booting my systems since I switch between Windows, Mac OS X and Linux fairly regularly.

Install windows 10 on macbook air 2011