How To: Install Boot Camp Drivers on Dual Hard Drive MacBooks

The Problem: Your 13-inch White MacBook has two hard drives (lucky you). You use your USB DVD drive to install Windows on your 1 TB dream machine, only to find that once installed, Windows doesn’t see your DVD drive, and you can’t install Boot Camp.

Here’s what’s going on: Your shiny new MacBook relies heavily on NVIDIA’s MCP79 chipset. And, Windows doesn’t have USB drivers by default for it. The Boot Camp firmware mimics a USB drive while the Windows installer is running, but that emulation isn’t there after Windows is finished installing. So, Windows can’t see the DVD drive to install Boot Camp.

Worse, Apple doesn’t provide a downloadable full driver set for Boot Camp online, only updaters… but that’s a gripe for another day.

The solution: Follow these steps.

Basically, we need to get the BootCampInstaller.exe that is on your Mac OS X Install Disc, onto your hard drive. If you’re the rare soul that is running Windows XP with FAT32 formatting, this is actually easy. If not, and we’ll assume you don’t, follow all of the steps below.

0) Again, we’re assuming you already installed Windows. Go do that if you haven’t already.
1) Download the following things: Your latest Boot Camp Drivers folder from the Mac OS X Install Disc, and NTFS-3G. The easiest way to get the Boot Camp folder from your Mac OS X Install Disc, is to insert the disc into a Windows PC and copy it from there.
2) Install NTFS-3G. Reboot.
3) Copy the Boot Camp folder that you grabbed from your Mac OS X Install Disc, and drop it on the root level of your Windows install drive. This is possible because NTFS-3G makes it writable.
4) Go to apple.com/support/downloads and download the latest Boot Camp update. Copy it to the root level of your Windows drive.
5) Reboot into Windows. Run the Boot Camp installer (from your OS X Install Disc). Reboot when done.
6) Now run the Boot Camp Driver Update downloaded from apple.com. Reboot when done.
7) Congratulations. You now have the latest Boot Camp drivers, and you have access to your USB DVD drive from within Windows. You just saved yourself the three hours of taking apart your MacBook just to put the DVD drive back in for a driver install.