Mid 2014 15" Retina Macbook Pro Bootcamp Windows 8.1

Question

Okay, so this is part question and part rant.
The question part: Has anyone successfully installed windows 8.1 in bootcamp on a mid2014 Macbook pro?
The rant part:
This new macbook is awesome. Everything is great. Except that apple needs to get their $h1t together on this bootcamp crap. I am an engineer. It is a sad world that we live in, and there is little I can do to change it, but as of right now, Microshaft owns the corporate world. Software for engineering is developed for winblows. Hopefully that will someday change, but for now I have to put up with it.
I purchased this brand new macbook with the understanding that I would have to install winblows on it, and with the understanding that I would spend about half of my time there. This is not choice, it is necessity. When I purchased this computer I did so because I was reassured that windows would run well in a dual boot.
5 hours of my time has been wasted trying to make that a reality. Currently, I am sitting here watching my mac reinstall Mavericks after being forced to wipe the entire drive due to incompatibility bullpoop.
So far I have tried:
Letting bootcamp do it's thing. This resulted in a near perfect installation, followed by a notification that the boot configuration could not be updated. great.
booting again and trying to format the partition with winblows. Winblows cannot install because of the GPT setup.
delete partition leaving blank space, boot in efi, and then allow windows to make the partition. This resulted in windows making 2 partitions (so far so good) and getting all the way to the end before letting me know that I am right back to trial 1 and it cannot update the boot configuration.
So I go into mac to delete these two partitions. The main one deletes, and the little one wont.
So i go into recovery. Still cannot delete partition.
I was forced to TOTALLY wipe the drive, and I am not sitting here looking at a screen telling me that in 4 hours the mac will have downloaded and installed Mavericks, and I will hopefully be back where I started a day ago. This is ridiculous.
So far I STILL do not have windows, and I am not really any closer. This is total and complete bologna, and I am about ready to return the macbook, and but a piece of $h1t winblows machine simply because it will ACTUALLY do what I HAVE to do. It would suck, because I prefer the Macbook, but if it flat out won't do what I need it to AND apple won't put enough effort into their compatibility software, I am going to be forced to make a compromise.
I send this faithfully from my Late 2008 13" Macbook running the new OS that I am not allowed to mention in this post without my post getting autodeleted.... Don't get me started on that... What is happening to apple? I want to love you guys, really I do!
Somebody help me please... If not with the computer, at least send me a cocktail.
MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2014), OS X Mavericks (10.9.4), Bootcamp

Answer 1

This is probably late but I just finished installing Win 8.1 on my new Mid 2014 15" MBP.  It still has a few quirks but it works.  I just purchased my MBP and it is configured with 16Gb RAM, 1Tb SSD, 2.5Ghz CPU and the NVidia Graphic Controller.  I am running the latest version of Yosemite.  Here is how I was able to make it work:
1) I purchased an OEM Version of Windows 8.1 64bit Professional from Newegg.com.   I needed an ISO in order to use bootcamp.  For this I used my dedicated windows 7 machine and installed burnaware_free.  This ripped an ISO from the Windows DVD.  Some websites will say you can use the Microsoft Windows 7 USB Download tool.  This tool will NOT work with an OEM DVD of Windows 8.1.  I tried it 3 times and all times it barfed and told me the tool could not be used on my version of windows.
2) I used a 16gb Flash drive and plugged it into my MBP and started the bootcamp utility.  (I used a 16Gb drive as I did read on a few web sites that stated you needed a Flash drive this big.  I'm not sure why as it does not fill it but perhaps with a 8Gb drive there is some temp files created that cause a problem)  When it gives me options I let it download the bootcamp drivers and when asked, I pointed it to my Win8.1 ISO that I created earlier.  (A side note, you MUST let the Apple bootcamp utility create the bootable USB drive.  Foolish me used a standard windows utility to create a bootable Win8.1 drive.  Went all the way through the download tools, repartition, etc.  The MBP reboots and then pukes telling me the USB I inserted is not a bootable drive.  It will boot on a windows box but not on the MBP.  I have no idea why but I know this to be the case.)
3) Windows should boot on the apple created USB flash drive.  It will walk you through the install.  The first thing you need to do is format the partition that the apple bootcamp utility created.  You will most likely be given 4 partitions to choose from.  Pick the partition that matches in size the one you created on the OSX side and select to format that partition.  Once formatted you can hit next and go forward.
4) Just a note.... if your eyes are as old/bad as mine, when Win 8.1 is installing it is not smart enough to know to scale objects and so displays everything in the native retina resolution.  I literally needed a magnifying glass to check the serial number I typed in to be sure it was correct.
5) Let the install do it's thing and finish.  When it completes and reboots, it will default to boot into windows.  This is probably not bad, as if you are like me there is then a whole host of things to install and multiple reboots are required.  Before I did a bunch of installs however, I wanted to test to make sure I could go back and fourth between the two OS's.  Here is where things get interesting.  On my install, once bootcamp was complete and windows 8.1 was installed, booting my MBP no longer gives the gray screen on boot.  The screen is now black.  At first this had me fooled into thinking something was wrong.  When it reboots and you just see the very faint change in the black screen you need to hit the alt/opt button.  Better yet, just have it shutdown and then hit the on button and hold the alt button next.  You will now be given two drives to boot from, the OSX side and the Windows side.  The recovery disk is no longer present.
6) I picked the OSX side and booted into Yosemite.  Everything on the Yosemite side is mostly right.  OSX sees the bootcamp drive.  I use the Paragon utilities that allow me to R/W NTFS from OSX and R/W HFS from Windows.  On the OSX side I can R/W the Bootcamp drive without an issue.  It is curious, however, that if I go to the system configuration and select Startup Disk, my windows drive is not visible.  I don't know the reason but it does not give me an option.
7) I reboot the MBP again and this time I go into windows.  On the Windows side Win 8.1, for some reason, is not seeing the OSX drive.  I can to into System Management tools and the partition is clearly there but at the desktop level there is no HFS drive.  For what I do this is not a huge deal but it is curious as with my old MBP, Win7 and Mavericks everything was visible on both sides.  If I go to the BootCamp Utilities and select Startup Drive, the utility on the windows side DOES see the OSX partition and gives me the choice to make OSX the default boot OS if I want or I can select Windows too.
So far everything works, sans the inability to see my OSX drives on the Windows side.  I've not used Windows 8.1 yet and so now I'm quickly discovering what all of the fuss is about.  I don't want to turn this into a Win8.1 rant but holy crap..... what did Redmond do?  Anyway, I found enough copious threads on the web to get 8.1 almost looking like 7 so I'm happy.  This was a major PITA however.
PS - One last note.  All of this came about because my poor mid 2011 17" MBP finally started suffering the graphic adapter fail that so many have been seeing.  Really torxs my chain as I really loved this trusty laptop.  Sans the graphic card issue I should have been able to run it another 5 years at least but turned itself into an unreliable time bomb that I just can't trust.  Its a real shame but it is what it is.  The new 15" MBP are very nice, very fast and very well built but I miss my 17" screen for certain.
I hope this helps someone so they don't have to go through the pain I did.