No bootable device - insert boot disk and press every key

Winclone
1

I’ve been working on this for a week to no avail. My wife and I have identical mid 2012 Macbook 15’s.

The goal for both was to install a 2TB SSD drive and partition it with the 3 OS that we require for our AV production business:

  1. Mac OS High Sierra 10.13.6
  2. Mac OS Mountain Lion 10.8.5
  3. Bootcamp running Windows 7

All of these OS are required for the various audio/video plugins we require so we must use these OS and the latest version of Winclone we can use is 7.3.4

On my computer I was able to install all OS with only one minor issue. BootCamp doesn’t show up as a startup disc in Recovery or High Sierra. I have to startup in Mountain Lion to get Bootcamp to show up as a startup disc. That’s fine, I can live with that and all OS work perfectly.

On my wifes computer, I’ve tried everything under the sun to get BootCamp installed properly and all roads lead to the familiar dead end “No bootable device - insert boot disk and press every key”. After an entire week of this I surrendered and wiped the entire hard drive to start over. This is the closest I got to success.

  1. Installed Mountain Lion - Success
  2. Partitioned 100gb Bootcamp Partion - Success
  3. Used Winclone & Target Disc Mode to migrate Windows 7 Bootcamp partition from my computer to my wife’s. Success
  4. Tested both Mountain Lion and Windows partitions on my wifes Macbook. Both worked flawlessly.
  5. Partitioned 1TB of SSD on wifes MacBook for High Sierra - Success
  6. Installed and tested High Sierra - Success
  7. Launched Mountain Lion - Still working perfectly
  8. Launched Bootcamp Windows 7 - FAIL: “No bootable device - insert boot disk and press every key”
  9. Ugh!!!
  10. Attempt to launch Bootcamp from both Mac OS FAIL: “No bootable device - insert boot disk and press every key”
  11. Attempt to launch Boot Camp from Recovery. Not listed. FAIL.
  12. turn off System Integrity Protection in macOS. Still FAIL “No bootable device - insert boot disk and press every key”
  13. Launch High Sierra, open Winclone. Select tools Tab “Make EFI Bootable”, attempt to launch bootcamp from both Mac Partitions. FAIL “No bootable device - insert boot disk and press every key”
  14. Launch High Sierra, open Winclone. Select tools Tab “Make Legacy Bootable”, attempt to launch bootcamp from both Mac Partitions. FAIL “No bootable device - insert boot disk and press every key”

This is an absolute nightmare that will not end. My identical computer works fine. What the heck is going on here? Why is High Sierra destroying the Bootcamp partition or at the very least, why is it making it unbootable?

Please help and thank you.

2

Here’s the Diskutil list from my wife’s problematic computer:

/dev/disk0 (internal, physical):
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: GUID_partition_scheme *1.9 TB disk0
1: EFI EFI 209.7 MB disk0s1
2: Apple_HFS Macintosh HD 796.2 GB disk0s2
3: Apple_Boot Recovery HD 650.0 MB disk0s3
4: Apple_HFS Mac OS X High Sierra 907.7 GB disk0s4
5: Apple_Boot Recovery HD 650.0 MB disk0s5
6: Microsoft Basic Data BOOTCAMP 105.1 GB disk0s6

3

Here’s the Diskutil list from my working computer:

/dev/disk0 (internal, physical):
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: GUID_partition_scheme *1.9 TB disk0
1: EFI EFI 209.7 MB disk0s1
2: Apple_HFS Macintosh HD 809.5 GB disk0s2
3: Apple_Boot Recovery HD 650.0 MB disk0s3
4: Microsoft Basic Data BOOTCAMP 103.2 GB disk0s4
5: Apple_HFS Mac OS X High Sierra 1.0 TB disk0s5
6: Apple_Boot Recovery HD 650.0 MB disk0s6

4

Figured it out. In short if you run Diskutil list in terminal and it shows your Bootcamp Partition as any number greater than 4 you are screwed.

The following articles helped me…sort of…by deleting the recovery partitions:

I was able to delete “Apple_Boot Recovery HD 650.0 MB disk0s3” and merge the empty space with disk0s2. However when I went to delete the other Recovery partition “disk0s5” it deleted the entire High Sierra Partition as well.

So basically for the 3rd time starting from scratch, I knew what I had to do, install and keep recovery partitions from hogging up the partition schemes. Here’s how to successfully copy, 2 Mac OS partitions and 1 Boot Camp partition onto 1 SSD.

-Start with a completely wiped SSD hard drive and format it Mac OS Extended.

-Transfer your first Mac OS to the drive using carbon copy cloner. When Carbon Copy Cloner asks if you want to include a Recovery Partition, select Cancel

-Partition the SSD drive creating a second OS Extended partition. Do not install the second Mac OS!

-Now create a MS DOS BOOTCAMP partition off of the 1st Mac OS Partition. Don’t import your Windows OS yet. This partition will now show up 3rd in your partition scheme. The second OS Extended partition will show up 4th.

-Transfer your your second Mac OS to the 2nd OS partition, again using carbon copy cloner. When Carbon Copy Cloner asks if you want to include a Recovery Partition, select Cancel.

-Finally, transfer your Windows OS to the MS Dos partition using Winclone.

Hope this makes sense, it’s late and I haven’t slept in a week trying to solve this. At the end of the day, just know that if your BOOTCAMP partition gets bumped to a number higher than 4 in your partition scheme, it ain’t gonna work and you’ll get the error " No bootable device - insert boot disk and press every key"

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