Friday 15 February 2013

An error occurred while trying to access the startup disk settings


You've likely arrived at this page because you've installed windows 8 with bootcamp on a new mac and received the above error when you tried to open the bootcamp control panel.

In what seems to be one of the most ridiculous situations to have ever arisen in personal computing: your permissions are too high... I can't really explain it except to say that if you try to run bootcamp control panel from a non-administrator account, you will be allowed access. So there are a few work arounds you can use:

Option 1: set up a second user account (non-administrator) and use that to access the bootcamp control panel

Option 2 (better): 
 - run command prompt as administrator
 - enter the following:
C:\Windows\System32\runas.exe /trustlevel:0x20000 AppleControlPanel.exe
This will allow you access to the bootcamp control panel but will not have a lasting effect.

Option 3 (best):
- right click desktop and choose New > Shortcut
- Enter the following into the item location prompt:
"C:\Windows\System32\runas.exe" /trustlevel:0x20000 AppleControlPanel.exe

Note the position of the quotations (they must be included)
- name the shortcut
- right click the new shortcut and click the advanced button under the Shortcut tab
- add a check to the run as administrator box
Congratulations, you now have a working shortcut for your bootcamp control panel

Hope that helps.