install windows 7 on macbook pro mid 2009

Click Refresh on the Windows installer to see your changes. The rest of the disk will be unused space. You’ll have a 2.2TB partition which is the maximum size for MBR. The result is the selected drive will be erased and formatted MBR. Select disk n (where n is the disk you want to install Windows 7 to)

Format the drive intended for Windows MBR using the Windows command line.

When Windows Setup asks you “Where do you want to install Windows”, press Shift F10 to get a command prompt.

You need to boot the Windows 7 installer from your internal DVD drive. Note: Bootable Windows 7 USB sticks and external USB optical drives will not work on this old Mac.

Boot to the Windows 7 installation DVD.

Formatted the disk intended for Windows 7 as Mac OS extended (Journaled) with Guid Partition Map in Apple’s Disk Utility for the fun of it.It would have been much easier with a 2TB drive. There’s no shortage of blog post hacks out there describing methods of how to install Windows 7 on old Mac Pros. If you attempt to format a 3TB drive MBR using the Apple Disk Utility in High Sierra, you’ll get the error message “The disk is too large to be supported by the given partition scheme. The selected disk is of the GPT partition style”. If you formatted it with Apple’s Disk Utility, you might get the following error message when trying to install Windows: “Windows cannot be installed to this disk.

To install Windows 7 on this old Mac Pro, the drive needs to be formatted with a MBR partition scheme. The third 3TB drive was to be added to the macOS installation as a data disk. The goal was to install Windows 7 on the second 3TB drive. We did a fresh install of High Sierra on the first 3TB drive. We recently had a Mid 2010 Mac Pro in the shop which had three 3TB hard drives.

Install windows 7 on macbook pro mid 2009