Question: Q: Thunderbolt Display Windows 10 Boot Camp

I have installed Windows 10 on my MacBook Pro Retina Mid 2012. I’m using 2 external Displays, but the Thunderbolt Display show’s only a black screen. All ports (USB, FW, Ethernet) on that Display work fine. I have updated all software.

MacBook Pro (Retina, Mid 2012), Windows 10, Thunderbolt Display

Posted on Jan 9, 2017 11:49 AM

All replies

Loading page content

Page content loaded

Are both your external displays Thunderbolt?

Jan 9, 2017 11:55 AM

the other display is a LG stock 24″ Display using with HDMI.

Jan 9, 2017 11:57 AM

Does the TB display work correctly if you reboot W10 with both displays already physically connected?

Jan 9, 2017 12:16 PM

The LG works correctly but the TB Display stays black (the ports works). On MacOS, all displays work just as they should.

Jan 9, 2017 12:21 PM

If you disconnect the LG, and reboot W10 does the TB display work?

Jan 9, 2017 1:42 PM

Tried it too with everything plugged out.

Jan 9, 2017 1:49 PM

Disconnect the LG, run the following procedure

and boot into Windows with the TB display connected and test?

Do you have any unknown devices in Windows Device Manager?

Jan 9, 2017 1:59 PM

That didn’t help either.

I plugged everything out of the Mac and the Display, but it still show’s no image.

Everything is fine in my Device Manager, there are no unknown devices.

Jan 9, 2017 3:49 PM

Let me test this configuration using MacBook Pro (13-inch, Mid 2012) — Technical Specifications and a Dell with HDMI.

Jan 9, 2017 4:24 PM

I did not have an exact environment for testing. The test used a late 2013 15-in rMBP, Apple TB Monitor and a Dell U2717 via HDMI running Windows 7. Windows 10 should also work with this setup. The difference in GPUs (GT650m — MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2012) — Technical Specifications vs GT750m — MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Late 2013) — Technical Specifications ) should not be causing such behavior.

1. TB Monitor connected and automatic drivers installation.

2. After W7 Reboot, no HDMI connection yet.

Intel Thunderbolt 3 driver with Boot Camp support

Intel has updated TB3 driver to 17.2.71.250. It has Boot Camp support now. It does not support TB 1, TB2, Win 7, or Win 8 anymore.

Added support for Apple* Boot Camp in Secure Connect mode (SL1) per Intel.

I’ve been having issues with all thunderbolt 3 devices on Boot camp (they all worked on Macos, but not on windows). Could this solve my issue?

@chocomonsters Thank you very much for letting us know. I’m not clear reading the release note whether version 17.1.64.250 or 17.2.71.250 is the one with added Apple Boot Camp support.

25 post members —>

@chocomonsters Thank you very much for letting us know. I’m not clear reading the release note whether version 17.1.64.250 or 17.2.71.250 is the one with added Apple Boot Camp support.

It was added in 17.1.64.250 so it should also be in 17.2.71.250, but this is Intel so who knows. 😀

What’s curious is that this driver is for the NUC and not for Apple products so it’s odd that Boot Camp support would be listed. As we know, many TB drivers are system/platform specific and installing drivers on a system it wasn’t intended for has a habit of breaking Thunderbolt completely. I’ve always relied on Apple to provide driver updates for Boot Camped Win10, using generic drivers has led to some ugly situations.

Intel Skull Canyon NUC (NUC6i7KYK) — 1TB Samsung 960 EVO NMVe SSD, 32GB memory
Apple Mac Pro 2013 — Deca-core 3GHz Xeon, 32GB memory, 1TB Apple SSD, D700 dGPU, eGPU shared with above NUC.
AKiTiO Node — EVGA GTX 1080Ti SC2 Gaming, Corsair SF600 PSU, Cougar Vortex HDB 120 case fan

Problem with installing Thunderbolt drivers in Bootcamp for Akitio Node

I’m planning to build an egpu setup around my 2016 Macbook Pro 15″ (Radeon Pro 455) to work in Windows and MacOs. I read this article from 9to5mac and I think I’ve got a good understanding of the process now.
Since the Akitio Node won’t be available in europe until april/may the only thing I can do right now is installing the Thunderbolt drivers in Windows so I can update the firmware of the Node when I finally have it.
I downloaded the same drivers as the guy from 9to5mac and installed them. But when I try to open the Thunderbolt program it says that the application is not supported by Bootcamp and that all Thunderbolt devices and computer networking will work correctly. I’ve also attached the error message but it’s in german so most of you probably don’t understand it.
So my question is: What did I do wrong? Do I have to install different drivers because I have the 15″ Macbook Pro? Or do I really don’t need any additional drivers? That would be weird because the guy from 9to5mac said that you have to install these drivers or otherweise the firmware update won’t work.

I would be really happy if someone could clarify this and reveal the problem.

Thank you very much in advance!

To do : Create my signature with system and expected eGPU configuration information to give context to my posts. I have no builds.

Is it possible to install and boot Windows on a Thunderbolt drive?

I know the BIOS emulation of the EFI firmware in Macs does not support booting from FireWire or USB drives, and the EFI version of Windows doesn’t seem to be compatible with Apple’s EFI implementation, so you can’t install or boot Windows from one of those. But Thunderbolt drives are really just PCIe SATA controllers with one or more SATA disks attached, much like internal drives.

I have read that you can boot OSX from at least some Thunderbolt hard disks and SSDs. So is it possible to boot Windows off such a drive? And can you suggest any specific models of disks or Thunderbolt-SATA adapters that support this?

I realise that the Boot Camp assistant might not cooperate as the drive is «external», but the assistant is just for partitioning. You can prepare the disk’s partition table manually, so the main question is if the Mac’s firmware will boot an MBR-based OS from a Thunderbolt drive.

Obviously I could just go and buy a Thunderbolt drive and try it out but they’re pretty expensive compared to otherwise equivalent and more universally compatible USB3 drives. Also, support is likely to vary between models, so chances are I’d pick up the wrong one.

4 Answers 4

I’ve not tried MBR 1 … but: you can indeed boot Windows 7 and Windows 8 (64-bit versions) in EFI mode off of a Thunderbolt-connected disk. I have a handful of the Buffalo Ministation Thunderbolt 2 drives with the original, slow 5400 rpm hard drives replaced with various SSDs, and they work wonderfully 3 . You can boot off of them by pressing Option during the chime at bootup, and they show as an orange-colored «EFI Disk» in the selection options.

Now, the trick is getting Windows installed on the disk in EFI mode, because when you stated that «the EFI version of Windows doesn’t seem to be compatible with Apple’s EFI implementation,» I assume that means (like me), you tried, and it just refused to install. Well, to my knowledge, that’s correct — however, the only part that isn’t ‘compatible’ is the install process — whatever Windows tries to do to the EFI partition just before it goes to reboot doesn’t work out right.

Solution to the rescue: install VMware Fusion on your Mac (even the trial will do) and use Vijay Pandurangan’s blog post to help you mount your external Thunderbolt drive directly to a new VM. Pay special attention to the comment at the bottom of the post: Hajo makes it much, much easier.

Partition the drive as GPT with OS X, and/or install an extra copy of OS X on the Thunderbolt disk first (if you wish) and leave free space for Windows. If you’re not planning to have a spare copy of OS X to boot from this drive, leave all the space blank (don’t partition beyond the EFI partition OS X will initialize with GPT).

Set the VM to boot with EFI, and install Windows 7 or Windows 8 (has to be a 64-bit flavor to support EFI) directly to the disk. Now, once Windows has gone through its setup process, and it counts down for a restart, shut the VM down. That’s right — you’re done with Fusion 4,5 , and you can go straight to booting from your new drive. Seriously. Press Option on boot, and you will indeed see «EFI Boot» as an option, you can choose it, and Windows on Thunderbolt you will have.

I don’t expect you would have any issue booting from any other standard Thunderbolt drive either, especially if it is an AHCI SATA drive like the Buffalo.

While I’m fairly confident that you could get plain-old MBR-based Boot Camp to work, why would you? EFI is the future, and once you go through the process, you can boot your Thunderbolt Windows disk from just about any new Mac 5 .

1 I haven’t had the need for it, yet. There isn’t an OS, or utility I’ve needed to run on my Macs that doesn’t have EFI support, and I have an aversion to looking back and strongly feel MBR is looking back — like 1983 called, and wants its 10MB MFM hard drive back, back.

2 The original disk worked fine too, but gaaah! so sloooww.

3 Brian Klug wrote a really excellent review on this particular drive on AnandTech, and that’s what convinced me to buy it. It’s a beautiful piece of equipment, with fit-and-finish like Apple, comes with both a Thunderbolt and USB 3 connector and cables! to match. Yes, the included drive is slow as all get out, but you can replace it with just about any 2.5″ HDD or SSD of your choosing. Just make sure you have a hair dryer.

4 Unless, you’re not. I use both interchangeably. You can boot directly into Windows 8 on hardware, and you can boot into it from Fusion using this configuration when the need strikes you, like you’re working on something, don’t want to reboot, but need to open a .PST file in Outlook 2013… for instance.

5 Windows licensing issues notwithstanding; you’re going to have to buy a copy of Windows for every machine you want to boot it on for long-term use in order to not get black backgrounds and «this copy is not genuine» type errors.

Thunderbolt in BootCamp

wulleybully

macrumors newbie

yjchua95

macrumors 604

wulleybully

macrumors newbie

Chippy99

macrumors 6502a

Here’s a related question (OP, I hope you don’t mind).

I have a 2011 Mac Mini and a 2012 iMac. Does anyone know if I can use the iMac as a monitor for the Mini by connecting the two via Thunderbolt and putting the iMac in target display mode?

Assuming this works (which I expect it would), what about running Windows on the Mac Mini and still using the iMac as a monitor? This is actually what I want to do. I want to leave the Mini running a native Windows app 24×7 and it would be kind of handy if I could keep an eye on it with the iMac.

wulleybully

macrumors newbie

Here’s a related question (OP, I hope you don’t mind).

I have a 2011 Mac Mini and a 2012 iMac. Does anyone know if I can use the iMac as a monitor for the Mini by connecting the two via Thunderbolt and putting the iMac in target display mode?

Assuming this works (which I expect it would), what about running Windows on the Mac Mini and still using the iMac as a monitor? This is actually what I want to do. I want to leave the Mini running a native Windows app 24×7 and it would be kind of handy if I could keep an eye on it with the iMac.

IlikeMacsSoMuch

macrumors 6502

Here’s a related question (OP, I hope you don’t mind).

I have a 2011 Mac Mini and a 2012 iMac. Does anyone know if I can use the iMac as a monitor for the Mini by connecting the two via Thunderbolt and putting the iMac in target display mode?

Assuming this works (which I expect it would), what about running Windows on the Mac Mini and still using the iMac as a monitor? This is actually what I want to do. I want to leave the Mini running a native Windows app 24×7 and it would be kind of handy if I could keep an eye on it with the iMac.

It works with the 27 inches but I’m not sure about the 21 inches

IlikeMacsSoMuch

macrumors 6502

I have the cal digit thunderbolt station and it is working in bootcamp but to make it work I had to manually install all the drivers, the auto install did not work. all the drivers are available at the caldigit website. I don’t know about the seagate go flex adapter.

When you say: » it is not possible to run a monitor off the HDMI on the thunderbolt station and have a display port adapter attached» do you mean 2 monitors, one on the hdmi and one on the thunderbolt port, both plugged into the caldigit?

Because on the caldigit website it says: «

1.Can I use an HDMI to DVI cable/adapter?
Yes, you can use an HDMI to DVI cable/adapter to connect to a DVI monitor.

2.Can I use multiple monitors with my Thunderbolt Station?
Yes, the Thunderbolt Station can support two monitors if one of them is an Apple Thunderbolt Display. You cannot use a monitor with a mini display port to DVI/VGA/HDMI adapter while using the HDMI port on the device for a multiple display configuration because only the first display that is detected will function.

For example
1. Thunderbolt Monitor and HDMI Monitor — Yes
2. Mini-Display Port Monitor and HDMI Monitor — No
3. Mini-display port adapter to DVI Monitor and HDMI monitor — No
4. Thunderbolt Display and HDMI adapter to DVI Monitor — Yes

Don’t know if that answers your question, but basically if you plug your hdmi monitor into a thunderbolt display it should work but not in any other way