Installing Windows on a Machine without a Optical Drive is a pain, because its no longer possible to boot from the Installation DVD. USB is no good workaround, because USB boot is also permitted somehow.
The case is getting more complicated when you have a FusionDrive setup as I have: I replaced my Optical Drive with a second harddisk (SSD) and formed one Volume out of it as a FusionDrive.
After Google’ing for many hours, i found a solution which actually worked on my setup.
http://huguesval.com/blog/2012/02/installing-windows-7-on-a-mac-without-superdrive-with-virtualbox/
Some Additions:
- Even If you have an MacBook Pro 2011: Do Part 1 Step 3! I didn’t do it and after rebooting I got a blue screen
- To trick the Boot-Camp Assistant creating the partition for you, it also works mounting the Windows Installation ISO with Toast or Daemon Tools
- The correct installation order is: FIRST create your fusion drive, then let the BootCamp Assisstant build the Windows Partition
- Don’t try the solution with replacing the MBR with the one created in the VM: It does not work on a FusionDrive setup
- To avoid the complicated removal of the “system reserved” partition as stated in the manual, do this: When you install Windows in the VM, format the drive. A message will popup informing you that it may create some more partitions blabla. Click ok and you will see it actually created 2 partitions. Now manually remove the small 100 MB Partition and install on the other one. It will work and boot correctly.
- WinClone is no longer free available as some stupid company bought it and did some minor updates to it. But maybe you find it somewhere. If you use the latest version, it will ask you if it should delete the cache files while creating the image. I clicked yes. On restore, I had it replace the booting-information.
Finally it worked. When I boot my mac holding ALT the boot device selection menu shows up. It displays my Mac drive two times as well as the windows drive two times. Anyone know a solution out there how to fix that?