Original reddit thread here

1. Overview and supported models

Why?

After wasting so much time and having much frustration, I have managed to successfully bootcamp my old A1297 17inch MBP with broken optical drive. I read and tried many guides without success until this (https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/179486/boot-camp-install-of-windows-issue-no-bootable-devices/180263#180263). It works, but slow and complicated to follow, and it is a nightmare when you have to reinstall your bootcamp. So I spent a couple days figure out how to do it universally, as easily as possible and I finally succeeded. I am sharing this to all of you so you don’t have to go through all that, enjoy 😇

Overview

This is the ultimate and simple guide to bootcamp legacy Macs without optical drive, Virtual Box or external PC, also contain optimization guide for such system. All Windows version are supported but Windows 11 has compatibility issues that need extra steps. In this specific guide, Windows 10 will be used as it works out of the box and also still supported by Microsoft. I personally use Windows 10 after trying both 11 and 10.

This guide is specifically targeted old Macs (iMacs, MacBooks, Mac mini…) that don’t officially support UEFI bootcamp (can still install but have compatibility issues), and especially for MacBooks that have super optical drive (either broken or not) and don’t support booting from USB (BIOS mode). Others Macs can follow this guide too because the underlying principle is the same.

This will be a long guide, so bear with me, this will get you from zero to hero 🙂

Requirements

1. USB drive 8 Gb minimum
2. Windows official iso (I’m using latest Windows 10 22H2).
   1. Guide here: https://gist.github.com/ezracb/2532bec8a8148010527bcb55c2ec5975
   2. Alternatively this link (MD5 hash is c2b19762870226ca467d6cbd87cd8fab) Source: https://github.com/mrrobot1o1/OS-Downloads (Windows 10 - 64bit)

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3. Bootcamp software (choose Windows 8 64-bit version, choose the right version is very important)
   1. Find your version here https://web.archive.org/web/20150513034151/https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204048
   2. Mine is Bootcamp version 5.1.5621: Download here
4. gdisk 1.0.10: https://sourceforge.net/projects/gptfdisk/
5. anhdv bootcd 25.0.7: https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/1d_q3pgOQBvUZ1zKCNQkg3tP_fh8ofWRh
   1. Extracting password is: anhdvboot.com

2. Brief explanation of the procedure (optional)

I highly recommend you read this part because it helps you understand what and why we are doing it.

There 2 type of boot mode (UEFI and BIOS), and 2 partition styles (MBR and GPT); UEFI uses GPT and BIOS uses MBR. Modern macs use UEFI for both macos and bootcamp, but that’s not the case in older macs. Older macs use UEFI for macos and BIOS for bootcamp and that’s why it is complicated. So in older macs, Apple uses a trick to make both UEFI/GPT and BIOS/MBR coexist on the same disk and it is called Hybrid MBR. Basically your disk will be configured to be both MBR and GPT at the same time in a way that it is safe not to destroy data from each others.

Procedure for preparing disks