Windows 8 on mac mini 2012

You may also store files in iCloud and access them whenever you need.

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If you have an external storage device, you can copy some files and folders on it. We do recommend you to back up your Mac before installing Windows as it minimizes the chance of losing important data.

No support? No problem! Installing Windows 8 on a Mac with Boot Camp | Ars Technica

The installation can be a little time consuming, but it is by no means difficult. Check out the details below. Boot Camp Assistant guides you through installing Windows on your Mac. You just have to follow the onscreen instructions. When you are done with the Assistant, your Mac restarts to the Windows installer.

In other cases, the right partition will be selected and formatted for you automatically. To finish the installation, you have to follow the onscreen instructions. On the Welcome to Boot Camp Installe r box, click Next and accept the terms in the license agreement. Then click Install to proceed.

When the installer completes, click Finish to reboot your machine. By default, your Mac will still boot to macOS. To access Windows, you have to turn your Mac off and then turn it on while holding the Option Alt key.

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Follow these steps:. All data, including software and files, stored on the Windows partition will be deleted, so make the backup copies first.

Now you can enjoy two operating systems and switch between them right when you need. Or you can name it when you've installed the first Windows.

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Another option: Boot from Mac OS X on the external hard drive, and use it to create a BootCamp partition on the external drive, and install Windows 7 or Windows 8 on that. At bootup, with the Option key held down, you could select whether you want to boot from Mac OS X or Windows 7 on your internal hard drive, or Windows 8 on your external hard drive which also has a Mac OS X partition that you created solely for the purpose of installing and configuring Windows 8 under BootCamp.

Given your needs as a developer, why not consider purchasing two inexpensive Windows PCs, one to run Windows 7, and one to run Windows 8, and then hooking up those two machines and your Mac mini with a KVM switch so that you can use the one keyboard, mouse and monitor to control all three computers, which are all up and running simultaneously? It seems to me that you would save a great deal of time because you would never have to reboot into another OS to test something. With only one monitor, keyboard and mouse, and the two other PCs on the floor, you would not take up any extra desk space either.

With a router nearby, you could connect all three computers with Ethernet or WiFi and set them up for file sharing through the different operating systems, or using various versions of VNC. Then you could easily move documents and files from the Mac to the Windows 7 or Windows 8 environments in real-time while all three are up and running. You would still use the KVM switch between your Mac mini and the one Windows PC, and that would cut down somewhat on the amount of time you lost rebooting between different OS.

But I think purchasing two cheap Windows boxes alongside your Mac mini would be the way to go. Although I do not have a mac mini myself and am not sure that this would work entirely but it theres no harm in giving it a shot. Proceed with installing either windows 7 or windows 8 as a single partition and follow the boot camp wizard to get it installed like normal. Once you are in the windows 7 environment, try partitioning the drive and see if you can install windows 8 onto that along with the boot camp drivers and whatnot. Once again I am not entirely not sure if this would be a solution but its an idea thats worth putting out there.

Hope it helps! I'd also say go for the external drive if you prefer not to hassle with a 3rd party bootloader that is no longer maintained actively. Or maybe the Mini has place for a 2nd internal drive instead of the optical, if you have a model that still had one. Note that you don't need to reinstall OS X to the extra drive, you can just clone your existing install with a tool like Carbon Copy Cloner. It's always a good idea to have a bootable clone of your boot disk, even with current day Recovery Partitions and TimeMachine backups.

Or, you could have 2 versions of OS X, of course, as a developer that may be of interest too esp. Parallels works great for this! I have multiple Linux distro's, Windows 7 and Windows 8 installed AND you can even run Windows software without actually being in the Windows environment, which I love! By clicking "Post Your Answer", you acknowledge that you have read our updated terms of service , privacy policy and cookie policy , and that your continued use of the website is subject to these policies.

Home Questions Tags Users Unanswered. Ask Question. Setup process Because we haven't talked about this in a while, let's take a gander at the Boot Camp installation process as it stands in Mountain Lion.

Native Windows 8 on a Mac mini: first impressions

Here's what you need: A Mac that supports Mountain Lion and has at least 20GB of free disk space, though more is obviously preferable. A valid Windows 8 or Windows 8 Pro license key.

For the purposes of this article, we're going to assume you're working with the bit version of Windows and at this point, you probably should be anyway. If you're using a Mac with an optical drive or a MacBook Air older than the model, you'll need a Windows 8 install DVD and, for the older Airs, an external optical drive. More on this in a bit. Do you find these overlays helpful? Well, they're not working in Windows 8. Some apps, like Chrome left are scaled up but they're blurry messes, and others like Firefox right scale up their UI elements but don't scale up the window content.

Scaling for the Start screen is handled separately from desktop scaling, so you need to go into Ease of Access the settings and toggle the "make everything on your screen bigger" switch. Note the blown up scroll bar and unscaled window content. I know there used to be an improvement in gaming performance using Windows On Macbook Andrew Cunningham Andrew wrote and edited tech news and reviews at Ars Technica from to , where he still occasionally freelances; he is currently a lead editor at Wirecutter.

He also records a weekly book podcast called Overdue.

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