jefftr66 Posted July 11, 2021 Share Posted July 11, 2021 Had a dual boot Hack working for some time. Had Win10 on 1 SSD but was having some problems and reinstalled on another SSD. (also needed more room) Whenever I booted into Windows I would get a screen to choose between the 2 drives - no problem, everything was working fine. So I reformatted the original SSD to remove Windows and now the other drive wouldn't boot or be recognized as a Windows drive. No problem, just reinstall Win 10. After some difficulty I finally was able to make a Win 10 USB but every time I try to reinstall I get "can't continue" error at different stages of installation. Not sure what to do at this point as I've installed Win 10 before and on the same drive... Any help appreciated Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Allan Posted July 11, 2021 Share Posted July 11, 2021 Hello 😃 Which method did you used to create your Win10 USB install? And I advise to disconnect your macOS SSD from the motherboard, and only plug the SSD for Windows. And install it without worries 😉 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jefftr66 Posted July 12, 2021 Author Share Posted July 12, 2021 Well I tried a number of methods but ended up using Terminal to create it (following this guide - https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/how-make-a-windows-10-usb-using-your-mac-build-a-bootable-iso-from-your-macs-terminal/) Unfortunately I can't disconnect the Mac drive as its an M.2. I do have other drives that I will disconnect and try again. Thanks. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
HenryV Posted July 12, 2021 Share Posted July 12, 2021 On 7/11/2021 at 12:58 PM, jefftr66 said: Had a dual boot Hack working for some time. Had Win10 on 1 SSD but was having some problems and reinstalled on another SSD. (also needed more room) Whenever I booted into Windows I would get a screen to choose between the 2 drives - no problem, everything was working fine. So I reformatted the original SSD to remove Windows and now the other drive wouldn't boot or be recognized as a Windows drive. No problem, just reinstall Win 10. After some difficulty I finally was able to make a Win 10 USB but every time I try to reinstall I get "can't continue" error at different stages of installation. Not sure what to do at this point as I've installed Win 10 before and on the same drive... Any help appreciated Verify that both of your SSDs are GPT partition table and the computer is configured to boot in UEFI mode. You should easily be able to use Gparted on a linux live distro on USB to recreate a new GPT partition table on the drive and reformat the drive onto which you want to reinstall windows 10. Make sure you are installing windows in UEFI mode and using a GPT partition table/that your BIOS is configured to boot in UEFI mode. If you are using one drive with an ESP then that is where you should tell windows to install the boot loader. Better yet use Refind or GRUB2 as your main boot loader and you can chainload clover/open core. I wold also suggest you migrate the windows 10 boot partition contents to the main windows partition as it is not there by default. There are instructions on how to do this on the web. More here in the windows section: https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/346639-updated-tips-and-observations-for-big-sur-and-monterey-b2/ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fusion71au Posted July 13, 2021 Share Posted July 13, 2021 (edited) 8 hours ago, jefftr66 said: Unfortunately I can't disconnect the Mac drive as its an M.2. I do have other drives that I will disconnect and try again. Thanks You can manually install Windows and its boot loader if you can't remove your other hard drives. I recommend UEFI installation so it plays well with dual boot macOS. Partition target disk as GPT - Refer to this tutorial 1. Boot to the Windows Install Media using your system's BIOS boot key eg for Gigabyte systems, press <F12> to choose USB installation disk 2. Press <Shift><F10> to open command line terminal 3. Prepare the disk to install Windows. In the example below, I am assuming target disk to install Windows is disk 0, creating 200MB EFI System Partition (assigned letter "S"), 16MB MSR Partition and 64GB Windows Partition (assigned letter "W"). Note the diskpart clean command will wipe everything on the selected disk - make sure you don't select a disk with valuable data on it. diskpart list volume list disk select disk 0 clean convert gpt create partition efi size=200 format quick fs=fat32 label="EFI" assign letter="S" create partition msr size=16 create partition primary size=65536 format quick fs=ntfs label="Windows" assign letter="W" exit Apply Windows Image using DISM for Clean Install - Refer to this tutorial 1. Still in terminal, type the following commands. In the example below, I want to install Windows 10 Pro (stored as Index number 1 in D:\sources\install.wim, revealed with the first command. Change commands to install.esd if your install medium doesn't have install.wim but has install.esd instead)... Dism /Get-ImageInfo /ImageFile:D:\sources\install.wim Dism /apply-image /ImageFile:D:\sources\install.wim /index:1 /ApplyDir:W:\ 2. Finally, install the Windows Boot loader to the EFI System Partition (assigned letter "S" above) in UEFI mode. Note the Windows Partition was assigned the letter "W" in this example... bcdboot W:\Windows /s S: /f UEFI 3. Close terminal and then reboot the system to the newly created Windows GPT disk. Edited July 13, 2021 by fusion71au 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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