MacBook – Finding drivers for Macbook Pro (13 inch, i5, 2.3GHZ) without bootcamp

bootcampdrivermacbook prowindows

I had a customer come in (regular) and brought me a mac his son screwed up by deleting partitions and installing windows. Somehow in the bootcamp process he screwed it all up.

So now there's a fresh windows 8 installation on it, but I cannot for the life of me find proper drivers for his wireless card and other items.

I have tried installing a driver for a different system (Acer system. Same chipset, same wireless card) but it failed in the setup (setup.rul 343)

Anyone know how to get this to work? The kid needs Windows for his distance schooling and has no mac disks to re-install.

Best Answer

Get a Snow Leopard retail install disk. Fix the partitions and erase and install Snow Leopard. Download and install the latest SL combo update, or continue on the the usual upgrade path to Lion and/or Mountain Lion according to the customer's preference and the capabilities of the Mac.

Download and install VirtualBox. Make a new Windows VM and re-install Windows. Note that Bootcamp doesn't yet support Windows 8.

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Windows – How to download Bootcamp drivers without Bootcamp assistant

Yes, It is possible to download the Bootcamp drivers outside of the Bootcamp tool:

Updated:

timothy-sutton's answer will make your life so much easier, go there first
For Windows 7 through 10, Apple have published a table of 'which download you need for which model' at https://support.apple.com/kb/HT5634. Win 7 download might work for Vista.
For WinXP, see robmathers' answer.
The hard way which follows here, taken from http://www.cafe-encounter.net/p682/download-bootcamp-drivers is your fallback if you want or need to work it from scratch.
1. Download from Apple the http://swscan.apple.com/content/catalogs/others/index-lion-snowleopard-leopard.merged-1.sucatalog file. Don’t double-click it.
2. Open the index-lion-snowleopard-leopard.merged-1.sucatalog file in a text editor or word processor.
3. Search for each occurrence — as at August 2012 there were 6 — of BootCampESD.pkg. For instance, the one I needed is http://swcdn.apple.com/content/downloads/33/54/041-2011/pRtCDYcWShMLxFggy3TzFzmfnnWQNFQBfJ/BootCampESD.pkg
4. Notice in each such URL, the /041-2011/ or similar /041-XXXXX/ bit of it.
5. Below each such occurrence, notice the URL for a file with the same 041-XXXXX in it and ending in English.dist, e.g. 041-2011.English.dist
6. Paste the URL for each such English.dist file into your browser and open that url. Here’s a list of them:
7. Search for the Model Identifier for your Mac. For instance MacBookPro5,2 or Macmini4,1.
  - For instance the 041-2011 file contains these models: MacBook2,1 MacBook3,1 MacBook4,1 MacBook5,1 MacBook5,2 MacBook5,3 MacBook6,1 MacBook7,1 MacBookAir1,1 MacBookAir2,1 MacBookAir3,1 MacBookAir3,2 MacBookPro2,1 MacBookPro2,2 MacBookPro3,1 MacBookPro4,1 MacBookPro5,1 MacBookPro5,2 MacBookPro5,3 MacBookPro5,4 MacBookPro5,5 MacBookPro6,1 MacBookPro6,2 MacBookPro7,1 MacBookPro8,1 MacBookPro8,2 MacBookPro8,3 MacPro1,1 MacPro2,1 MacPro3,1 MacPro4,1 MacPro5,1 Macmini2,1 Macmini3,1 Macmini4,1 iMac5,1 iMac6,1 iMac7,1 iMac8,1 iMac9,1 iMac10,1 iMac11,1 iMac11,2 iMac11,3 iMac12,1 iMac12,2
  - How do you know your Model Identifier? Open System Information, and look in the Hardware Overview section. i.e. click Apple menu -> About this Mac -> More Info… -> Report -> Hardware -> and now read down the Hardware Overview looking for “Model Identifier:”
8. Having found your 041-XXXXX number, download the BootCampESD.pkg url that has your number in it. Again, here’s a list of them:
9. Be patient as it’s probably 600MB.
10. Once your pkg is downloaded, double click it and install to a folder on your hard drive so you know where to find it.
11. The folder contains a nest of folders, the last of which contains a dmg disk image file. Double click to open. Voila. Here are your Windows installer files.
12. Copy them to a USB drive, or a burnable CD. It’s still 660MB or more, so it’s a full CD worth of burning time.
13. Done. You can now proceed with Boot Camp assistant Windows installation.

source: http://www.cafe-encounter.net/p824/bootcamp-drivers-direct-download-of-bootcampesd-pkg . The page was aimed at people struggling with BootCamp, but either way, it gets you to the BootCamp.pkg file, which contains the drivers.

You still need open the OS X installer pkg file to get the the contents out, and to open a DMG file. If you are already in Windows, 7-zip will open it: http://www.cafe-encounter.net/p860/opening-a-bootcamp-driver-download-on-windows-7-or-8-with-7-zip

MacBook – Bluetooth Manager not present in Boot Camp (Windows 7)

It seems this has to do with your older macbook pro because I have a more recent iMac and my Bootcamp version shows Bluetooth devices. When did you download that version of Bootcamp? If you're still using the original version from years ago, you may want to try downloading a new version as it may include the Bluetooth capability. If not, your computer may just be too old. Hope this helps, good luck!

Best Answer

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Windows – How to download Bootcamp drivers without Bootcamp assistant

MacBook – Bluetooth Manager not present in Boot Camp (Windows 7)

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