Installing Windows 10 via Bootcamp

[456]

I downloaded Windows 10 iso. When I run bootcamp it says it can only make a 30 gig partition and it needs 42 gig. I see 50 gigs free in the About this Mac storage utility...any solution????

 

[Raz0rEdge]

I sure hope you don't have just 50 GB free of your entire drive. Bootcamp is going to create a separate partition and if it does that, you'll have no more free space for macOS and it'll be very unhappy with you.

What is the total size of your drive?

 

[456]

128K. Can I run Windows from a 64gig USB drive?And have a decent experience with it?
I only need it very occasionally.

 

[Raz0rEdge]

Bootcamp won't work off of external drives. And you mean 128GB and if you want to take away nearly 50% of that for Windows, then you're going to strapped for space.

Do you really need to Windows natively on your Mac? If you are live with a virtual environment then grab a copy of VirtualBox (free) or VMware Player (free) and create the VM to install Windows into. The advantage of this approach is that you can place the VM on the external drive and not take up any of the internal space and of course have access to both Windows and macOS at the same time.

If your Mac is a Macbook Air with 8GB of memory or something, the VM is going to be OK but not ultra performant. If you've got a MBP with at least 16GB of memory, it'll be better.

Can you tell us why you want to run Windows?

 

[ferrarr]

I just installed the VMWare Fusion Player and installed windows 10 in the Virtual Machine. You just need to make sure you have enough space on your internal hard drive. I gave the VM 100GB, and there's still about 80GB free.

 

[456]

I got V box ....gave it 20 gb..its slow..but it works...I had the Windows 10 iso...
VB Windows can't get into any of my Mac stuff, correct??

 

[Raz0rEdge]

I got V box ....gave it 20 gb..its slow..but it works...I had the Windows 10 iso...
VB Windows can't get into any of my Mac stuff, correct??

Yes, virtual machine is going to be slower since it's sharing the CPU with macOS.

And yes, you can share folders easily. In VB when you created the virtual machine, there should be a Shared Folder option, use that to select which folders you want to share. Within Windows ensure that you install the guess extension pack which will then give you access to the shared folders.

 

[ferrarr]

Use VMWare Fusion Player instead, it's much faster.

https://www.vmware.com/products/fusion/fusion-evaluation.html

The registration will give you a link to download the free version for personal use.

 

[Raz0rEdge]

Assuming the OP is using their MBA with 4GB of memory, not much can be done to speed things up. That vintage MBA has 2 cores, so there's not much that can be done with that. You dedicate 1 core to macOS and 1 core to VM and now both macOS and the VM are slow.

Previously I used a Mac Mini with 6 core CPU and dedicated 2 cores to the VM and 4 cores for macOS and Windows 10/11 was reasonably usable.

 

[456]

but it only uses the core if windows is going..

 

[Raz0rEdge]

Bottom line, the MBA is not meant for this.

 

[Rod]

Hi 456, I'm a bit puzzled about "Your Macs Specs" in your profile; "M1 Mini 16GB/Air and 2017 4gig"
Is this 2 devices or 3 and which one has 128GB storage?

 

[Raz0rEdge]

Rod, I read that as 1) M1 Mac Mini and 2) Macbook Air.

Since Bootcamp isn't supported on M1/M2 based Macs, it's the MBA that the OP is talking about.

 

[456]

I bagged Windows and tried to install Ubuntu but when I got to selecting a partition it was unclear how to do it.... is there a utility for that that people use now for Ubuntu on the 2017 Air running the latest OS....?I wouldn't try any of this on my M1...

 

[ferrarr]

ZIf your version of Windows can be activated, you may be able to run from an external (flash/thumb) USB drive. See this article,

How to Run Windows From a USB Drive

Stuck using a PC with an older operating system? Not if you know how to run Windows 10 or Windows 11 from a flash drive.

www.pcmag.com