How to use Boot Camp On a Mac With a 3TB Fusion Drive

How to use Boot Camp On a Mac With a 3TB Fusion Drive

If you’re among the disappointed users who bought a new 2012 iMac with a 3TB Fusion Drive, only to discover that you could not use Boot Camp on your $2000+ piece of equipment, there’s good news for you! The folks at Twocanoes (via 9to5Mac) have devised a workaround to trick your Mac into installing Windows via Boot Camp anyway!

Boot Camp Assistant is not supported by Apple for hard drives larger than 2.2 TB. If you purchased a new iMac with the 3TB option (either with a Fusion drive or just a standard drive), Boot Camp Assistant will refuse to partition your hard drive into a Mac and Windows partition. However, it is still possible to create a working Boot Camp partition for Windows, provided you use the partitioning scheme as outlined in this tutorial.

The step-by-step tutorial guides you through the process of creating specific  additions on your drive to force Windows and Boot Camp to recognize the drive layout (the result is a 2.2TB partition that Boot Camp doesn’t have a problem with). Fortunately, it’s a pretty simple process.

Apple could easily update Boot Camp Assistant to address the issue. But so far, that apparently hasn’t made their list of things to do. Because fixing broken features on extremely expensive equipment that thousands of users purchased apparently isn’t high in their priorities…

Check out the full tutorial over at Twocanoes!