We also recommend either using a second external hard drive or pen drive to transfer the Boot Camp support files from your Mac to Windows during the installation process. Remember that you’ll need to format the external drive for your Mac before your Mac will recognize it. The best SSD external drive for Mac is the Samsung T7 Portable SSD which is available with up to 2TB of storage space which is more than enough to run Windows from and install Windows updates, games and apps. Speed is extremely important when trying to run Windows from an external drive on your Mac. If you don’t already have one, there are several Mac compatible external hard drives that work best and we strongly recommend choosing a Solid State Drive (SSD) which is much quicker than a mechanical hard drive because it has no moving parts.

The first thing you’ll need to install Windows without Boot Camp is an external hard drive. With this in mind, here’s how to easily install Windows on a Mac without Boot Camp for free. However, you can still install Windows on an M1 Mac without Boot Camp by using Parallels instead. Unfortunately the following instructions to install Windows on a Mac without Boot Camp only work on Intel Macs.Īpple Silicon M1 and M2 Macs have advanced security protection that won’t allow you to boot from an external drive. Can You Install Windows on an M1 or M2 Mac Without Boot Camp? You only have to buy an activation key for Windows 10 or Windows 11 if you want to remove a small watermark from them and customize them. The other great thing is you can install Windows on a Mac for free nowadays. This also has the advantage that Windows does not take-up any of your hard drive space on your Mac’s hard drive as it’s all stored and run on an external drive. However, if you want to keep your Mac and Windows files truly separate or don’t have enough hard drive space on your Mac’s internal hard drive, then an even beter way to install Windows on a Mac is by using an external hard drive to run Windows. The best way to install Windows on a Mac is using a virtual machine such as Parallels which is easily the best alternative to Boot Camp.

You can’t run them at simultaneously like you can with a virtual machine.Īnother big problem is that the latest M1 chip Macs do not support Boot Camp so you can’t install Windows on an M1 Mac with it.īoot Camp also requires a lot of hard drive space on your Mac to install and run Windows plus games or applications that you want to use with it. One of them is that you can only boot your Mac in Windows on macOS using Boot Camp.

However, Boot Camp has quite a few disadvantages when it comes to installing and running Windows on a Mac. Until the release of Apple Silicon M1 Macs, Boot Camp was one of the most popular ways to install Windows on a Mac, especially for gaming. How To Install Windows Without Boot Camp.Can You Install Windows on an M1 or M2 Mac Without Boot Camp?.

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