Do you find that BootCamp assistant download is stuck or or fails or could not continue?

The brute force solution: it’s a darned large download, so physically take your machine to somewhere with a very fast internet connection that can download 600MB – 1GB in a couple of minutes. There, you’re done.

Installing Windows 10 on a Mac without Bootcamp. Installing Windows on a Mac should be a piece of cake with Bootcamp, but that rarely is the case. In fact, I would personally say that Boot Camp Assistant is one of the worst apps that comes with OS X and unlike the rest, it doesn’t work seamlessly. It re-downloads 1.6 GB Windows.

For the rest of us, there are 2 options:

The simple solution – recommended – is to use this list of Windows driver download links for Macs with OS X Mountain Lion (which includes all retina display macs) or Lion, Snow Leopard or Leopard. That’s about everything back to 2007.
There are also older links here, but they appear to be redundant — the Mountain Lion file covers Mac models going back to Leopard.

Finally, the DIY solution: Work out for yourself which download link you need.

The DIY way to find your BootCampESD.pkg download link from the sucatalog

Not for the faint-hearted.

My steps to download the Lion or Mountain Lion drivers were as follows:

How to Manually Download Windows Drivers for Macs Running BootCamp 4 or BootCamp 5

1. Download from apple the http://swscan.apple.com/content/catalogs/others/index-mountainlion-lion-snowleopard-leopard.merged-1.sucatalog file. Don’t double-click it, that won’t help.
2. Instead, open it in a text editor or word processor.
3. Search for each occurrence — as at August 2012 there were 6 — of BootCampESD.pkg. For instance, the one I needed is http://swcdn.apple.com/content/downloads/33/54/041-2011/pRtCDYcWShMLxFggy3TzFzmfnnWQNFQBfJ/BootCampESD.pkg
4. Notice in each such URL, the /041-2011/ or similar /041-XXXXX/ bit of it.
5. Below each such occurrence, notice a URL for a file with the same 041-XXXXX in it and ending in English.dist, e.g. 041-2011.English.dist
6. Paste the URL for each such English.dist file into your browser and open the Url. Here’s a list of them:
7. Search for the Model Identifier for your Mac. For instance MacBookPro5,2 or Macmini4,1 or whatever
   • For instance the 041-2011 file contains these models: MacBook2,1 MacBook3,1 MacBook4,1 MacBook5,1 MacBook5,2 MacBook5,3 MacBook6,1 MacBook7,1 MacBookAir1,1 MacBookAir2,1 MacBookAir3,1 MacBookAir3,2 MacBookPro2,1 MacBookPro2,2 MacBookPro3,1 MacBookPro4,1 MacBookPro5,1 MacBookPro5,2 MacBookPro5,3 MacBookPro5,4 MacBookPro5,5 MacBookPro6,1 MacBookPro6,2 MacBookPro7,1 MacBookPro8,1 MacBookPro8,2 MacBookPro8,3 MacPro1,1 MacPro2,1 MacPro3,1 MacPro4,1 MacPro5,1 Macmini2,1 Macmini3,1 Macmini4,1 iMac5,1 iMac6,1 iMac7,1 iMac8,1 iMac9,1 iMac10,1 iMac11,1 iMac11,2 iMac11,3 iMac12,1 iMac12,2
   • How do you know your Model Identifier? Open System Information, and look in the Hardware Overview section. i.e. click Apple menu -> About this Mac -> More Info… -> Report -> Hardware -> and now read down the Hardware Overview looking for “Model Identifier:”
8. Having found your 041-XXXXX number, download the BootCampESD.pkg url that has your number in it. I try to keep the page at bootcamp-driver-download up to date with all the pkg download URLs.
9. Be patient as it’s probably 600MB.
10. Once your pkg is downloaded, double click it and install to a folder on your hard drive so you know where to find it.
11. The folder contains a nest of folders, the last of which contains a dmg disk image file. Double click to open. Voila. Here are your Windows installer files. Again, the page at bootcamp-driver-download has pictures to help.
12. Copy them to a thumb drive or a burnable CD or something. The point here is that you need the somewhere that a new install of windows with only minimal drivers can read them. NB, it’s still 660MB or more, so it’s a full CDs worth of burning time.
13. You can now proceed with Boot Camp assistant Windows installation, which will eventually reboot your machine for startup in Windows.
14. Once you’re in Windows, run the installer that you saved to CD or thumb drive.
15. Done. Marvel as all your Apple hardware now works nearly as well as it does in Mac OS X.

Problem: the latest Windows 10 update 1903 runs into BSOD (Blue screen of death) with error message WDF_VIOLATION on some mac models (MacBook Pro 2010/2011, MacBook Air 2011, Mac Mini 2012, iMac 2010/2011 and some others). This fatal failure occurs when Windows is already loaded and system tries to start Apple Boot Camp Utility (BootCamp.exe). This tool is responsible for controlling screen brightness, volume, functional keys, backlit, etc with Apple keyboard. On some machines crash happens only if you try to start our Macs Fan Control app.

Cause: older versions of the MacHALDriver.sys driver supplied with the Boot Camp Utility are not compatible with Windows 10 1903.

Solution: Basically you need to update to Boot Camp 6Chessbase reader for mac. or later.

First you need to disable the old driver to allow Windows to boot normally. The driver file located at c:windowssystem32MacHALDriver.sys must be renamed, e.g. to “MacHALDriver.sys.old”. There’re 2 options here:

• (from Windows) Boot up in safe mode (holding the F8 key) and rename the file.
• (from macOS) Install Tuxera NTFS or Paragon NTFS for Mac to allow write access to Windows drive/partition and rename the driver file. Both apps are commercial but have a trial period.

After that you can boot Windows 10, but Apple Boot Camp Utility won’t work. Macs Fan Control is able to work without the Boot Camp driver but slowly.

Install 7Zip and Brigadier. Run the latter to download and install the latest official Boot Camp from Apple for your machine. Sometimes it may still download a faulty old version (e.g. for mid-2010 iMac), in this case we recommend downloading Boot Camp for another model using the –model parameter:

and run the Boot Camp installer manually (run your command prompt as administrator):

Tip: to avoid this problem, we highly recommend updating your Boot Camp using the Brigadier app before updating Windows to 1903.