To be clear:
1) You booted a Windows 7 installer on a USB stick connected to your MacBook Air and installed Windows 7 to your MacBook Air's hard drive.
2) You used rEFIt on a USB stick to boot the Windows 7 installation on your MacBook Air's hard drive.
3) You are attempting to use rEFIt (on your hard drive?) to boot the Windows 7 installer on the USB stick?
5.) Install Ubuntu. Plug USB flash drive into MBA and restart. At rEFIt menu select booting from USB(try reboot if has a long-playing black screen and try press the “F6″ or “e” key while starting up), press F6 select “kernel boot option: nomodeset” and then start installation. Pay attention to following while installation.
- Finally, copy the WindowsSupport in your Downloads directory to the Windows 10 USB stick so it’s easy to get to after our installation. Partitioning Your Drive. In Disk Utility, select your internal hard drive on the left panel, and click on Partition.
- I made a rEFIt USB stick to boot Windows *installation* from a (different, simultaneously plugged in) USB stick. This worked great (thanks!). Both OS's work fine and I can access both by using either the built in boot manager or using my rEFIt USB stick if I choose.
- Ubuntu bootable USB drive does not show up as bootable. But I some where read that you can do this if you install rEFIt (you can continue his toturial here).
If 3 is true, but it doesn't work, it means that rEFIt does not know how to boot Windows from a USB stick. The rEFIt documentation states that USB devices are usually not supported by Apple's BIOS. But since it appears that you can get Windows to install from a USB stick on a MacBook Air, then it means that Apple's BIOS has been updated on the MacBook Air to support USB devices. Therefore, the problem lies with rEFIt, unless there's something special about your USB stick.
Bypass rEFIt by pressing the option key at startup to get into the Startup Manager.
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1310
To help rEFIt development, you can try selecting the USB stick from the Startup Disk preferences panel in Mac OS X, then dumping the contents of NVRAM using the following command in Terminal.app:
nvram -p
The following command produces the same results in a more readable format:
ioreg -w 0 -n AppleEFINVRAM | sed -n -E '/^[ |]+[ ]+('.*)$/s//1/p;'
Verify that the USB stick boots using the Startup Disk preferences panel.
I have used Boot Camp to create a bootable usb of Windows 7. But when I hold Option to select the drive all I get is my Mac OS and the restore drive or whatever it is.
Shouldn't Boot Camp create the USB to be bootable? Am I doing something wrong?
5 Answers
There is an alternative method to
Refit Usb
- create a bootable USB of Windows 7 and
- boot from it
Assuming that you have the ISO handy (if you don't, there's Digital River links here), download Unetbootin.
Unetbootin allows you to create bootable USB drives from many Linux distributions and also ISO images. (note that Unetbootin requires admin privileges) The following image demonstrates how to manually select the ISO image. Click the '...' button to browse for your image.
To boot from your USB drive, I recommend rEFIt. I use it myself to boot from an Ubuntu partition on my external hard drive that I use as a Time Machine on another partition. It is useful for recognizing operating systems installed on your computer and devices connected to your computer (and their partitions). I recommend simply burning rEFIt to a CD/DVD to boot to the Windows 7 install USB. Having had trouble trying to install it to the Mac itself (without the DVD), I usually boot to the rEFIt DVD, and continue to boot to my choice of operating system.
(boot to a rEFIt DVD by holding down the C key [or the option key, as you stated] after you hear the chime of the startup)
I know for a fact that Unetbootin works for creating bootable Windows install USB's (I've run them before on PC's). I will test booting from rEFIt and update this answer when I have.
Ethan LeeEthan LeeI ended up playing with the Superdrive a bit more, and eventually got it to read the DVD by laying the iMac down horizontally. I guess this meant the disk could spin easier and it read it easily.
Still doesn't solve my USB booting thing but...
For some MacBooks with disc driver, boot from USB with OS other than MacOS X is not allowed. If you really cannot use CD, you may try follow http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/install-windows-on-mac/ to install Windows with disc image.
'If you use Boot Camp, you may not be able to boot natively into supported versions of Microsoft Windows XP or Windows Vista operating systems installed on external USB hard drive.' - https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201663
For a drive to be Bootable by Intel Macs, it must be formatted with the GUID Partition scheme.
See:
Starting from an external USB storage device (Intel-based Macs)
Partition a disk
Install Refit Usb Driver
Alexander