Boot Camp Won’t Work With macOS Mojave on 2012 27-Inch iMac With 3TB Hard Drive - MacRumors
Skip to Content

Boot Camp Won’t Work With macOS Mojave on 2012 27-Inch iMac With 3TB Hard Drive

by

Apple today shared a support document that will be of interest to customers who own a late 2012 27-inch iMac with a 3TB hard drive and are attempting to upgrade to the macOS Mojave update.

There is an issue on this iMac model that results in the following alert when attempting to install macOS Mojave: "Installation cannot proceed with Boot Camp configured."

imac 2013 color
To fix this problem, Apple says that customers with the 2012 27-inch iMac with 3TB hard drive will need to completely remove the Boot Camp partition using Boot Camp Assistant before macOS Mojave can be installed.

After upgrading to macOS Mojave, Boot Camp will not be able to be used to install Windows on these machines. No other iMac models appear to be affected by this issue.

Related Forum: macOS Mojave

Top Rated Comments

macduke Avatar
98 months ago
Good thing Apple designs their own hardware. The software only has to run on a limited subset of hardware so it's easier for them to test and focus on making a good user experience. /s
Score: 25 Votes (Like | Disagree)
techguy9 Avatar
98 months ago
That’s oddly specific. Hopefully it can be resolved soon.
Score: 8 Votes (Like | Disagree)
98 months ago
What???

How does this make any sense? Is Apple really listing the 2012 iMac as supporting Mojave then?

This seems like a serious oversight.
Score: 8 Votes (Like | Disagree)
98 months ago
Not the only model affected. I have a 2013 iMac with Bootcamp on a Fusion drive and Mojave happily installed... it just broke my Bootcamp in the process.

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/mojave-breaks-bootcamp-on-fusion-drive.2142473/
[doublepost=1537822253][/doublepost]
I seem to remember that BIOS emulation on EFI tends to not support drives over 2TB. Maybe that's the root cause? In that case, I wouldn't expect it to get resolved.

It's odd that Boot Camp would still be using BIOS emulation, I'm sure Windows 10 prefers EFI.
Boot Camp on 3 TB Fusion drives had to do a lot of voodoo. The start of the Windows partition had to be within the first 2 TB of the disk. High Sierra did some Core Storage tricks and put the Windows volume in the middle and had HFS+ partitions around it.

This is how my partition looked (when it worked):

Attachment Image
Score: 6 Votes (Like | Disagree)
Shoju Avatar
98 months ago
No other iMac models appear to be affected by this issue.
I wish. I ran into the same message trying to install Mojave on my late 2014 iMac (27", Retina 5K, 3TB Fusion Drive). What's going on?! Don't tell me I won't be able to use Boot Camp again after updating to Mojave!?

Attachment Image
Score: 4 Votes (Like | Disagree)
computersteve Avatar
98 months ago
Now if I owned this model i'd be pissed... I love bootcamp.
Score: 4 Votes (Like | Disagree)

Popular Stories

imac video apple feature

Apple Released Yet Another New Product Today

Friday March 20, 2026 2:39 pm PDT by
Apple has unveiled a whopping nine new products so far this March, including an iPhone 17e, iPad Air models with the M4 chip, MacBook Air models with the M5 chip, MacBook Pro models with M5 Pro and M5 Max chips, the all-new MacBook Neo, an updated Studio Display, a higher-end Studio Display XDR, AirPods Max 2, and now the Nike Powerbeats Pro 2. iPhone 17e features the same overall design as...
ios 26 4 pastel

iOS 26.4: Top 10 New Features Coming to Your iPhone

Friday March 20, 2026 2:44 pm PDT by
iOS 26.4 isn't the major update with new Siri features that we hoped for, but there are some useful quality of life improvements, and a little bit of fun with an AI playlist generator and new emoji characters. Playlist Playground - Apple Music has a Playlist Playground option that lets you generate playlists from text-based descriptions. You can include moods, feelings, activities, or...
iPhone 18 Pro Deep Red Feature

iPhone 18 Pro Launching Later This Year With These 12 New Features

Wednesday March 18, 2026 7:39 am PDT by
While the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max are not expected to launch for another six months or so, there are already plenty of rumors about the devices. It was initially reported that the iPhone 18 Pro models would have fully under-screen Face ID, with only a front camera visible in the top-left corner of the screen. However, the latest rumors indicate that only one Face ID component...