How to Install Windows 10 via Boot Camp on Older Mac Pro via USB

This way does require you have a Mac compatible graphics card handy as it'll be required for the installation process, so if you don't please see the Boot Camp via DVD guide which allows you to install Windows 10 onto a Mac with a non-Mac flashed card like the RX 580.

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WARNING
Installing Windows is generally safe, but you can accidentally select the wrong disk to format and end up wiping macOS, so be very careful to select the BOOTCAMP partition. Proceed at your own risk.

GUIDE
Alright first up, if you don't already have a copy of Windows, just jump on google and get a copy of the latest iso from the Microsoft website.

Inside you want to search for two things.
PreUSBBootSupportedModels - Where you should see your Mac version listed, in my case I'll just remove the entry MacPro5,1.
NonWin10Models - Where I'll again remove the entry of my machine MacPro5,1.

Now if you launch the modified Boot Camp Assistant app, it should say Install Windows 7 or later version.

Insert a USB drive in, and point the ISO Image to the ISO you just downloaded.

After your USB drive is prepared, you'll be able to select how much space you want to give Windows. Now be careful at this stage as it's really hard to modify the amount of space after setting.

Boot Camp Assistant will now go ahead and try to reset your computer in Windows.

However, as booting from USB isn't available on this Mac Pro, you'll have to hold down the Alt key as the system boots to load up the Boot selector screen. If you don't have a Mac compatible graphics card plugged in, now is the time to plug it in, as the Boot selector screen will not load without one.

Once the Windows 10 installer has loaded, go ahead and select your region and input your product key. When you get to the Where do you want to install Windows screen, select the BOOTCAMP labelled partition. Windows will at this stage require you to format the partition to NTFS. Note, this won't affect macOS, just the new partition you selected earlier when you split your drive up.

If after formatting Windows complains of a 0x80300024 error, that just means it's confused about which drive it should install Windows still. In my case, I was installing Windows on a PCIe SSD drive and I needed to unplug the SATA drive I had plugged in.

Once unplugged I was able to continue.

After the install, Windows will restart your computer, in my case it rebooted back into Windows and continued the install, however in some cases, you might be rebooted back into macOS. If this happens to you, just hold down the alt key again on boot, wait for the boot manager to load up and select your Bootcamp partition to continue.

Alright, that's pretty much it, finish up the installer, go ahead and install the Boot Camp drivers and reboot your machine.

You might notice that your screen is a little stretched at first, but after Windows update has finished updating the drivers for your graphics card, all should be good in the world.

You can also at this stage of course, turn off your system and plug back in your original non-Mac compatible graphics card.

One thing to note is that some users have experienced issues when swapping the PCI slots of the graphics cards, so it's worth making sure you plug your go to graphics card in the slot you plan on using it long term.

Finally, to get back into macOS you can use the Boot Camp app. Unfortunately, if you are using a non-Mac compatible graphics card, as the boot manager isn't loaded, it'll just reboot you back into Windows.

So to get around this, you can either have both your Mac compatible graphics card and your non-Mac compatible graphics card plugged into your Mac at the same time, or reset the PRAM every-time you want to reboot back into macOS - which unfortunately is very tedious.

Once back in macOS you can always reboot back into Windows again from System Preferences - Startup Disk.

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[willthesadpills]

I had to go through like 10 other tutorials that never told me how to modify bootcamp for my 2010 macbook pro you were the only one! THANK YOU

[khanfamily]

Thank you for this. I’m planning to get a Mac Pro but I didn’t want to have an out dated MacOS. I would especially use this for gaming so this is very useful.

[starbarrette]

EDIT - this way won't work on the latest win 10 iso's, and installing via bootable USB can cause damage if you are not careful.
Seems the easiest way is to install win 10 via virtualbox (trick it to install on a hard drive, then boot to that hard drive). Look online for instructions. Perhaps it's simpler to install win7/8 via bootcamp and then upgrade to win 10 from within windows?? (Haven't tested, seems a legit option)

For anyone wanting to install on a Mac pro 5, 1 the info.plist has changed. Remove the entry from PreUSBNootSupportedModels as mentioned in the video, add MacPro5, 1 to PreWindows10OnlyModels and fix up the typo (nice one Apple) on the SupporedNonWin10Models section so it now reads SupportedNonWin10Models... Ensure your Mac model entry is in here too. Save the info.plist, open the copy and now you can install windows 10.
EDIT: you will probably still get stuck at the bootcamp wizard taking forever with copying the windows files, then saying you have run out of space. I suspect this is because the USB is formatted FAT32 and as soon as the install.wim file hits 4GB it falls over. FAT32 cant handle single files over 4GB... Perhaps earlier versions of win10 didn't exceed this? <-- confirmed

[laurencebrown]

Thanks buddy... you information is really useful. (I've now done a full Mac Pro rehab) I had one issue with downloading the bootcamp Windows iso ... it errored stating the USB isn't big enough...(even though it was!)... someone ells on the forum sugested its a problem with FAT32 only being able to handle 5mb downloads... by using the earlier, and smaller April 2018 windows iso release it worked!

I'm by no means a computer expert but I hope this might help others!

[DaktarBaba]

installed windows 10 on a imac pro mid 2010 and it worked perfectly. Thanks for the tutorial :)

[Xordo]

I have a mac pro 5.1 from mid-2012 with High Sierra and it would not let me install windows with boot camp, I had to install it on another hard drive and it would not let me install the boot camp drivers, which was not a fully functional installation. The information you have shared to change the string to support the 5.1 models will be very useful for me. Thank you very much for the video, greetings

[shanusharma]

Damn man. You just revived my mid 2009 MacBook Pro. Just upgraded to SSD and I have a new laptop.

[rogblackmore]

Thanks for the video, love the approach. I hope I can get this working on my old macbook pro from 2010. It's on OS X 10.6.8 🤞

[dominicpascal]

love how the key is misspelled "Suppored" … so Apple devs make the same mistakes as any other dev 😄

[CoolOutSessions]

What's the best way to install ANY windows program on my 2008 Mac Pro with El Capitan ?

[aaronfolkrod]

Thank you SO much. I was getting all the parts together to do a full-blown upgrade/overhaul of my Mac Pro Mid 2010 5, 1 and install Mojave only to find out that BootCamp in Mojave on this machine would not support Windows 10 and that REALLY bummed me out and was practically a deal-breaker until I found your video! My question is since this is technically not supported by Apple, how is the overall stability of Windows 10 via BootCamp on your machine? I just wanted to see if anyone here could attest to how well it runs and if you can do serious tasks and gaming in Windows 10 BootCamp without hiccups or issues. Thanks again for this very informative and helpful video you are a life saver. SUBSCRIBED.

[panofish]

You also need mac os sometime after el capitan... in your case... it looks like mojave. older mac os won't have the same values in info.plist

[tugdualfaucher]

hello, great video which is very explanatory but I have a problem, after modifying the Boot Camp (as indicated in the video) I put my Windows iso and my usb key but when I start the load, I have a message after several minutes of Boot Camp which tells me that the disk does not have enough space while my key has all the space available (32gb) and that my ssd still has more than 100gb of free ... is it because of my ssd system which does not have a partition for bootcamp (I skipped the disk utility step at the beginning because I want to install it on another hard disk) the problem is there ??? thank you in advance for your response

[michaelbalkam]

I did it a little different, either way I still modified boot-camp. I edited the info.plist in xcode still nice job using text edit. I have done that before although I wanted to try xcode too get the same result, and I did.

[fmj_]

thanks. I tried this on my mid 2010 macbook pro. i couldn't find my specific 7, 1 identifier in info.plist so i just deleted everything that said macbook pro and it works!

[s_m_a]

For all the people who couldnt find the non win10 support, dont worry just save the file launch bootcamp and do what the guy says

[parnordqvist]

In my case I have no boot screen in my Mac Pro 5.1 mid 2012. That’s because I have an videocard from Nvidia (Geforce GTX680) which doesn’t support boot screen in 60 Hz 4K. The screen is black until log in-window appears. Right now I have big doubts about the whole machine when Apple dropped support for it during WWDC. I am thinking about changing platform to Windows, but maybe I can install it on my 2 TB SSD-disk. I have 1, 24 TB free. Well, it should be a computer-change. Maybe new Mac Pro, for ’’only’’ 5 999 US Dollars... or more.

[deglar]

Hi,
I followed the instructions to remove those two lines of code on the Boot Camp copy and clicked save but the same denial of service message appeared, 'Boot Camp Assistant cannot be used. This Mac does not support Boot Camp' Not sure I go from here.

[太陽雨-is]

Thanks for the video. A quick question, with new MacOS, metal graphics cards such as RX 580 are supported, will that make it easy to install windows 10 using bootcamp?

[Xreal]

Thanks brother.. it worked like a breeze "Thumbs up"