MacOS – Trying to install Windows 10 on early 2008 MBP without using the BootCamp Assistant

BootCamp Assistant is only for installing the OS, or burning the drivers CD used to help you complete the installation of drivers for your particular hardware.

Once you have a working Windows 7 install, Bootcamp just provides the facility to boot between the two OS, Windows and OS X.

In this case, you have successfully completed the install of Windows 7, but you are having issues installing VS2010.

Whatever the install issues with VS2010 Express are they are unlikely to be related to the fact that Windows is running on a Mac, and more than likely to be install pre-requisites, such as service pack level, etc.

Without further information its unlikely that we would be able to determine what the issue is, or if it is in any way related to being run under Bootcamp. Have a look to see what the install.log said.

This might seem like a long shot, but it was also the only option for me to install Windows into my Bootcamp partition a little while back. It's also the only option for a Mac that used to have an optical drive but no longer does, since for some reason these devices are no longer able to boot from USB.

1. Use Disk Utility to create a FAT partition a little larger than your wanted Windows partition.
2. Install rEFIt.
3. Reboot twice for rEFIt to install properly. As soon as you see the rEFIt boot menu when starting, it's good. Here you choose the 'Partition Tool', with which you'll change the MBR (Master Boot Record). (On a side note: You can easily uninstall rEFIt by renaming the directory at the root of your harddrive)
4. Install VirtualBox, Parallels or VMware. I did this with VMware back at the time, but all of these should work as long as you're able to mount the virtual harddrive like any removable disk.
5. Use the virtualization software to install Windows into a virtual machine at the size of your wanted partition (not what you made it above, but a little smaller than that). You can of course install from an ISO here, making the state of your disc drive irrelevant. Kill the virtual machine as soon as it reboots the first time after finishing the installation, stopping Windows before being able to configure itself.
6. Use the virtualization software's features to mount the virtual harddrive.
7. Install a tool called WinClone.
8. If your virtual drive is mounted, WinClone should be able to see this in the tab 'Image'. Pull this into an image onto your harddrive.
9. Now choose the 'Restore' tab in WinClone and restore this image to your Bootcamp partition.
10. Now you can reboot and boot into your Bootcamp partition with rEFIt, which is no longer of any use from this point on, but you can keep it around as well. Windows should now continue configuring itself and finish the installation.

I stumbled across this solution here in the Apple Support Community and posted about it here a while ago on a German Apple User Forum, if that turns out to be of any use to anybody.