Boot Camp Assistant Download For Mac
May 24, 2016 Question: Q: Boot Camp Assistant 6 Windows Support Software Download Location Currently, I'm trying to get Windows 10 working on my Macbook Pro Retina 13' El Capitan 10.11.5. I just bought it earllier this May and it's currently an Early 2015 model. If you want to remove Windows from your Mac and free up space, reboot into macOS and open the Boot Camp Assistant again. You’ll see the Restore Disk to a Single Volume option. Boot Camp Assistant will automatically remove Windows and expand the macOS partition for you, reclaiming all of that space. Go back to Boot Camp Assistant and choose Action > Download Windows Support Software from the menu bar. Save or copy the 'WindowsSupport' file to a USB flash drive. Restart your computer to Windows (you can hold Option during boot up).
Some very interesting changes in how Windows is installed in Boot Camp on OS X 10.11 “El Capitan”. When you open Boot Camp Assistant on a new Mac that supports Windows 8 or later, you’ll get the new Boot Camp interface. Notice the ISO image and partitioning are all on a single screen.
Boot Camp Assistant Download For Mac 10.4.11
Prior to El Capitan, you had to insert a USB Flash Drive and Boot Camp Assistant copied the Windows installer from an ISO disk image to the flash drive, and then downloaded and set up the Windows drivers to the correct location in the installer for the Mac hardware. El Capitan makes this a lot simpler. Just select the ISO and how much space you want from Boot Camp, and then you click Install. After Boot Camp Assistantd completes, OS X restarts to the Windows installer, and you follow the normal Windows installation. Behind the Scenes So how is this possible? Where is the Windows installer if there is no installation media?
Boot Camp Assistant doesn’t just create a Boot Camp partition, but also creates an additional partition called “OSXRESERVED” that is FAT32 formatted. It places this partition right after the recovery partition, and before the Boot Camp partition, as shown below. The command line make this really clear.
Partition 1 is the standard EFI partition, partition 2 is the Mac partition, partition 3 is the Recovery partition. All standard stuff.
We've used a few commercial (and expensive) virtualization tools on our MacBook Pro, but after using VirtualBox for Mac we think we'll ditch the commercial products. Access to system resources such as hard-drive partitions, USB devices, CD player, and so on is mostly clean, although some USB devices may cause issues. To test VirtualBox for Mac we loaded up virtual machines with Windows 7, Windows Server, Mac OS X, and two versions of Linux. On our 8GB RAM MacBook Pro we could run two or three virtual machines at the same time (each allocated 1GB RAM) and switch between them cleanly. Hackintosh virtualbox image download. Fortunately, as an open-source project VirtualBox for Mac has lots of contributors and advisers on its forums that can help troubleshoot issues.
Partition 4 is now the OSXRESERVED partition, and partition 5 is the BOOTCAMP partition. You’ll also notice that disk2 is the Windows install ISO disk image that the Windows install files are copied from.
The OSXRESERVED partition has all the installer files, the Boot Camp drivers for Windows, and the EFI files for booting. If you are familiar with EFI booting on OS X, you’ll see a familiar setup.
Boot Camp Assistant Download For Mac
The EFI folder on the OSXRESERVED partition is the same one you would normally find on the EFI partition (normally disk0s1). It appears that newer Macs have the ability to detect this partition and present it to Windows as if it were EFI installation media (such as a DVD or USB Flash drive). So what happens to this partition after you are done installing? During the next boot into OS X, the OSXRESERVED partition is removed and put back into the Core Storage container of the OS X partition: Note that the Device is disk0s5 since the other partition existed on startup, but then it was deleted. On next reboot, this device will change back to disk0s4, which is the standard device location for a Boot Camp partition. This setup is not supported on all Macs that run El Capitan.
Only hardware that has newer firmware supports this. We did a survey of all the shipping Macs, and here are the ones that support this new slicker setup: Supported: • Mac Pro • MacBook Air 13‑inch • MacBook Air 11‑inch • MacBook Pro 13‑inch • MacBook Pro 15‑inch Older USB Installation • iMac 21.5″ • iMac 27″ • MacBook Pro 13‑inch • USB-C MacBook (surprising) El Capitan’s Boot Camp-related updates are not just limited to Boot Camp Assistant. There are also changes in how Boot Camp is affected by the new System Integrity Protection (SIP). Tune in tomorrow for the next segment. Do you have Windows running on your Mac in a Boot Camp partition? Check out and to backup, migrate, and manage your Boot Camp partition.