I’m having difficulties installing a Windows 8.1 trial on my late-2009 iMac. I had Vista installed a little while back, but think I installed this when my iMac was running Snow Leopard (it’s since been upgraded to Mavericks).
I’ve created two DVDs: one with the Windows trial ISO, and one with the ISO converted to a .crt file. Boot Camp complains that this Mac can only run Windows 7, and also recognises neither of these as installation disks; it just keeps telling me to insert the installation disk and wait a few moments.
So I’ve tried re-booting my iMac and holding down the Alt key, but it doesn’t pick up the optical drive; it just displays two hard drive partitions (Macintosh HD and Recovery). (It also doesn’t detect the partition I’ve set aside for Windows, but I guess that’s because it’s formatted as ExFAT).
I’m therefore out of ideas as to what to do, in that I’ve resorted to trying to install Windows in a VM. This isn’t ideal, as I wanted to be able to boot into Windows and use it just as I would OS X, not through virtualisation on an OS X desktop.
So…
- What am I doing wrong with Boot Camp, and why does it not recognise neither the burned ISO or .crt DVDs as installation disks?
- If there’s nothing I can do with Boot Camp, is there any way I can take the image of my Windows VM, and apply it to the partition set aside on my iMac’s hard drive so I can boot into it?
Best Answer
If you don't want to have a separate OS, Parallels Desktop for Mac puts a virtual window on your Mac Desktop with Windows. A free alternative is VirtualBox although requires more computer knowledge.
To help your issue without using Parallels, try using a USB drive.