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all. I am a longtime bootcamp user and have dealt with a fair amount of its crazy errors, but this new one really has me stumped. So I recently deleted my windows 7 partition because it refused to update, and decided to simply reinstall windows 7 from scratch from an iso that had the most recent updates installed, which would unironically take less time than trying to figure out how to make win update work.

Halfway through the normal process of creating a boot drive, bootcamp keeps giving me this error:

bootcamp error

The usb I am using is an 8Gb Kingston that I have been using for bootcamp installations for a few years, but other usb's also exhibit this error, and other iso's I managed to find that also contain an updated win7 also don't work. The only thing I can imagine causing this is the fact that the iso is bigger than normal, and the biggest file in it is 4.1 Gb.

Is there a way to make bootcamp maybe use exFat formatting or somehow else accept this iso? I refuse to get win10, and a regular installation simply does not install security updates.

Any help at all would be informative and extremely appreciated by me. Thank you all sincerely in advance.

EDIT: It seems that the larger file size is indeed what prevented the recovery drive from being made - I wish Apple had created a more specific error message in that case. Formatting it to exFat does not work as bootcamp does not recognize it, sadly. Thanks for the help anyway.

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  • The error is oddly worded, but the underlying issue is that 4.1GB file, FAT32 max file size is 4GB.
    – Tetsujin
    Commented Jan 9, 2017 at 7:30
  • Makes sense, so can you format it exFAT and see what happens...?
    – Steve Chambers
    Commented Jan 9, 2017 at 19:32

1 Answer 1

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In the past, an 8 GB USB would suffice to create a Bootcamp boot drive for Windows 10 (talking from experience), but now you need "a blank 16 GB or larger USB 2 flash drive," as Apple states on their Boot Camp support website. I too found out the hard way, as the process of creating a boot drive on my old 8 GB USB failed.

It's possible that the latest versions of Windows 10 (Anniversary Edition onwards) simply require more than 8 GB for their installers.

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