Step 0: all you need from the boot-camp these days is to get WindowsSupport folder downloaded into your USB stick FAT32 formatted one. Prerequirements: you need 2 USB sticks = 1 formatted NTFS (because you might have no DVD drive anymore around) and created as Windows7 installation using unetBootIn, 1 formatted FAT32 for win32/64 MBP drivers to be stored onto with the help of boot-camp however if you don't have MBR drive partitioned - windows 7 will refuse installation - the only cure is a 'hybrid' GPT/MBR configuration explained below. (I didn't install any drivers from the disk and didn't have any problems)Įnvironment: any MBP/MBA having GPT (yes GPT, not MBR, because 10.11/10.12/Sierra/etc will not allow you to have MBP partitioned drive and installed on it, especially on wireless recovery mode). Unless you're putting everything on one big raid volume and booting straight from that, osx isn't really hurting anything except a few megs off your boot volume, but that's not typically a problem. When you are done with the install, reboot and hold down 'alt' and then control-click the windows-7 drive to make it the default boot volume and you don't have to hold 'alt' down anymore on restart.Īs others have said, it's probably best to just use bootcamp and set windows as the default. You have to hold down the 'alt' key when it's rebooting and then select the hard drive to boot from, otherwise you will be stuck with a white/grey screen. When you reboot with your windows 7 cd, it will do some initial instally-things and then reboot your computer. There's some general issues with booting macs that most users probably know already, but I did not:ĭo the disk util thing the way the vista instructions describe. Had similar experiences with Adobe on parrallels in OSx. You can use VMLight instead, but I installed itunes on that and it just crashed without running. of course, you need bootcamp to be able to boot both of these (maybe you could install osx to another hd or something). Forum rumor has it that if you boot first to osx and then reboot into windows 7 that osx will start it for you and then you can use xp mode. But macs don't have 'bioses' so you'll have no way to do this after you install.

if you want to use 'xp mode' with windows 7, you have to enable your hardware virtualization in the bios.

It will work, but here are a few things I wish someone would have told me: I did it following the Vista instructions that Joseph posted above.

Windows 7 on macbook pro 2011 parallels