Hi folks! I recently replaced my 2011 iMac's failing internal hard drive with a nice, spacious 4TB chonker, and decided I could spare the room for a Windows partition again — it's been a few years, and there are a few Windows-only games I wouldn't mind trying to play again. Thing is, my iMac disagrees. For clarity, I should mention I'm running macOS High Sierra 10.13.6, the most recent OS available for this machine as of this writing (Mojave doesn't support the old girl).
Route 1: Boot Camp
If I try to use Boot Camp Assistant, I get as far as hitting the first Continue button before being faced with this:
![GMgxCdq.png]()
(For those coming in from Google, that's "The startup disk cannot be partitioned or restored to a single partition.")
But, uh…the startup disk is formatted as a single HFS+ volume. Unless you count the EFI and recovery partitions, but that's kinda splitting hairs. Here's the output from diskutil list in Terminal:
So I don't know what Boot Camp Assistant is on about. Maybe it's just stressed and needs a break. Let's get Disk Utility in on this action.
Route 2: Disk Utility
Disk Utility wedges a FAT partition into the internal HD without breaking a sweat. Great. When trying this, I give macOS 3 TB and Windows 1 TB. Then, I pop my Windows 7 DVD in and reboot.
It boots from the DVD, lets me proceed through to the point where I try to select which disk to install into…and then stops cold. The installer refuses to put Windows on the partition I've set aside for it, because the disk uses GUID Partition Table (GPT). There appears to be nothing I can do past that point, short of wiping and reformatting the entire disk to appease the Windows installer. Nuh-uh, buddy.
From Googling around about this problem, I've gleaned that GPT is supposed to include a mechanism to imitate the MBR partitioning scheme for older, less hip OSes, but Apple's implementation of GPT may or may not lack that feature. No clue what, if anything, to do about that. God, if only Apple had some sort of software tool that automatically partitioned the drive in a correct, usable way so as to install supported versions of Windows alongside macOS. Ah well, we can dream.
I've also tried installing Windows 10, but it lacks driver support for some parts of my iMac, so I'm left with dubious video support and no audio whatsoever. Kinda sucky for games.
Also, if it helps, I have a 2 TB external drive (literally just a bare hard drive in a SATA-to-USB cradle) which currently holds a bootable High Sierra installation with all my stuff migrated onto it. I've actually used that to wipe the internal drive completely and start from scratch once.
So, uh…any ideas? Anything else I didn't mention that would be helpful to know? Thanks in advance for any help you wonderful people can come up with!
Route 1: Boot Camp
If I try to use Boot Camp Assistant, I get as far as hitting the first Continue button before being faced with this:
(For those coming in from Google, that's "The startup disk cannot be partitioned or restored to a single partition.")
But, uh…the startup disk is formatted as a single HFS+ volume. Unless you count the EFI and recovery partitions, but that's kinda splitting hairs. Here's the output from diskutil list in Terminal:
Code:
/dev/disk0 (internal, physical):
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: GUID_partition_scheme *4.0 TB disk0
1: EFI EFI 209.7 MB disk0s1
2: Apple_HFS Macintosh HD 4.0 TB disk0s2
3: Apple_Boot Recovery HD 650.0 MB disk0s4So I don't know what Boot Camp Assistant is on about. Maybe it's just stressed and needs a break. Let's get Disk Utility in on this action.
Route 2: Disk Utility
Disk Utility wedges a FAT partition into the internal HD without breaking a sweat. Great. When trying this, I give macOS 3 TB and Windows 1 TB. Then, I pop my Windows 7 DVD in and reboot.
It boots from the DVD, lets me proceed through to the point where I try to select which disk to install into…and then stops cold. The installer refuses to put Windows on the partition I've set aside for it, because the disk uses GUID Partition Table (GPT). There appears to be nothing I can do past that point, short of wiping and reformatting the entire disk to appease the Windows installer. Nuh-uh, buddy.
From Googling around about this problem, I've gleaned that GPT is supposed to include a mechanism to imitate the MBR partitioning scheme for older, less hip OSes, but Apple's implementation of GPT may or may not lack that feature. No clue what, if anything, to do about that. God, if only Apple had some sort of software tool that automatically partitioned the drive in a correct, usable way so as to install supported versions of Windows alongside macOS. Ah well, we can dream.
I've also tried installing Windows 10, but it lacks driver support for some parts of my iMac, so I'm left with dubious video support and no audio whatsoever. Kinda sucky for games.
Also, if it helps, I have a 2 TB external drive (literally just a bare hard drive in a SATA-to-USB cradle) which currently holds a bootable High Sierra installation with all my stuff migrated onto it. I've actually used that to wipe the internal drive completely and start from scratch once.
So, uh…any ideas? Anything else I didn't mention that would be helpful to know? Thanks in advance for any help you wonderful people can come up with!
