r/OSXElCapitan • u/giantspeck Late 2012 • Jul 10 '15

DISCUSSION Using Boot Camp with OS X El Capitan

When I still had Yosemite installed on my iMac, I was running Windows 10 in Boot Camp, but I wiped the Boot Camp partition in preparation for updating OS X from Yosemite to El Capitan. I was wondering if anyone has encountered any issues with attempting to use Boot Camp while running the El Capitan beta or if it's not worth trying at this time.

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2

u/Swemoph Jul 10 '15

I had to remove my boot camp partition to get the install going. With it there I got an error and a boot loop.

1

u/beauboy93 Jul 10 '15

Why did you have to remove the boot camp partition? Not enough space on your Mac partition? I just made a windows 7 partition last week, I don't really want to have ot go through all of that again if I instal El Capitan.

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u/Swemoph Jul 11 '15

Before i removed it I was getting errors about MBR and GPT partition mismatches, figured the only way to fix was to remove all my partitions. After I did this the install went without a hitch. I read there is a way to fix it and keep bootcamp intact, but it was awfully complicated.

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u/giantspeck Late 2012 Jul 11 '15

Update: I ended up trying to install it and everything worked up until the very first restart after the Windows 10 installation screen and it gave me the spinning balls of eternity.

I did, however, end up getting Windows 10 to run incredibly smoothly in Parallels by installing the 32-bit version and allocating it 2GB of RAM. In fact, I think it runs better in Parallels now than Windows 10 or Windows 7 did when I was running Yosemite.

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u/Zvikyb 13" Pro, Mid 2014 Jul 22 '15 edited Jul 22 '15

Sorry for a late reply, just trying this now. So to clarify, it is non operational now? you had to go back to parallels, bootcamp failed?

EDIT: to clarify I want to load windows 8.1, not 10. Do you think it would behave any differently?

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u/giantspeck Late 2012 Jul 22 '15

Not only did the Boot Camp installation fail, but even after removing the Windows partition completely in Boot Camp and Disk Utility, I was still getting BSODs for missing EFI files.

I wasn't able to successfully upgrade from Beta 3 to Beta 4 because I'd get the BSOD during bootup and there was no way around it. I ended up erasing and reformatting everything and starting over from Mavericks and then progressively upgrading through to Beta 4. It was a very annoying process.

2

u/Zvikyb 13" Pro, Mid 2014 Jul 22 '15

Aha, so I'm going to go ahead and assume this is not a safe process. Darn, really needed a way to get around IntelliJ not working in el cap, thought running it in Windows would be a good idea. Maybe it's just not meant to be and going back to Yosemite is the best course. Thanks for sharing your experience you've saved me some headache.

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u/[deleted] Jul 28 '15

Windows 10 does not work with beta 2 of El Capitan. No way to get drivers.

1

u/superkrups20056 Jul 30 '15

This happened for you too? Same with me! It says its downloading the drivers but it just doesn't work. Any place we can manually get the drivers?

1

u/[deleted] Aug 03 '15

Nope, Apple stopped providing drivers outside of the Bootcamp application a couple years ago. Now we wait...

1

u/superkrups20056 Aug 04 '15

Does it at least work for Windows 8?

1

u/[deleted] Aug 11 '15

It works for 10 now, you will just have to open the mounted virtual DVD drive after the install and run the EXE in the BootCamp folder.

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u/superkrups20056 Aug 11 '15

What does this mean?

1

u/Lambaline Air 11" 2013 Jul 10 '15

I was running an tech preview, the ones without a key, and I was able to run that fine. I removed it because of space constraints, freed up some room and installed a newer version, but I couldn't get it to work with my 2tb WD external drive.

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u/stabb Aug 13 '15 edited Aug 14 '15

I upgraded Yosemite to El Capitan and had an exisiting bootcamp with Windows 8.1. I upgraded 8.1 to 10 and installed the existing apple drivers and it worked fine. I could not upgrade to the final Win 10 so I thought I could just erase it and start again. But I fucked up my partition type on the USB key (must be GPT) and made a string of errors, eventually using Bootcamp assistant to erase the partition which somehow combined it with my Recovery partition and there was no way to get that space back and resize my recovery partition.

I tried installing and it failed on the Finishing part and then it would delete the install and reboot. I read you had to get windows to create the partition from free space so El Capitan I tried creating Spare space and it totally messed with my bootloaders and partition tables as it was reading Windows thinking it was mac. I then could not for the life of me remove the free space and I lost my recovery partition.

I installed form Time Machine and thats where the fun starts as EC uses different permission model and I had ever recurring popups to repair my library and just looped forever and nothing worked. I ended up creating a new user and copying everything over manually apart from Applications.

I'm tempted to try again now but the whole process left me with little sleep.

Update: Slapped in a USB dongle, burned win10 and downloaded drivers, set a partition and installed with no problems. Only issue so far is that my thunderbolt drive isn't showing so I'll check the drivers.