Solution: Unable to Access Boot Camp Control Panel on Windows 8 OS

By Sidharth | Apple

So you have installed Windows 8 on your Mac machine, downloaded a couple of important drivers, configured the keyboard and trackpad and just when you are about to pat your back for your good work, new errors appear out of nowhere. Here is another error message that becomes apparent when you try to access Boot Camp on Windows 8:

Boot Camp Error on Windows 8 Mac Computer

Boot Camp error on Windows 8 installed on iMac.

An error occurred while trying to access the startup disk settings.

You may not have privileges to change the startup disk. Make sure you have administrative privileges and try again.

Such errors can be quickly fixed by right-clicking the Boot Camp icon, then navigating to Run as Administrator. Did that fix? Quite surprisingly, there’s was no option to run the app as administrator. But don’t worry, the problem has a solution, though it requires a little bit of effort from your end.

There may be other ways to launch or open Boot Camp Control Panel on Windows 8, but below you will find a temporary solution that fixes the above error.

What Should You Do

You will be creating a new user account to change the role of existing account, only then you can access Boot Camp Control Panel. Below you will the complete instructions on what should be done, assuming you already have two admin accounts:

  1. Log off from your primary user account and sign in using the second account.
  2. Now change the role of primary user to standard user.
  3. Sign back in as primary user.
  4. Make changes to the Boot Camp Control Panel.

It’s that simple! Once you are done with the above steps, you can go back to the second account and assign primary user account back to admin once again.

Did this help? Are you facing any other issues related to Boot Camp on your Mac or Windows machine?

Note: MacBook Pro, Air users can tweak trackpad settings using Boot Camp Control Panel.

Related posts:

Share
Tweet
Share

About the Author

Hi, I am Sidharth. Full-time blogger. Editor of Blogote. And a self-proclaimed geek!

Leave a Comment:

(2) comments

Joshua March 8, 2013

There is another solution that takes a bit of technical know how. It doesn’t require switching your account status and permanently fixes the problem.

1. Download and Install the windows 8 SDK – http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/desktop/hh852363.aspx
2. Navigate to C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\8.0\bin\x64 (or x86 at the end if you’re on a 32 bit version)
3. Copy C:\Windows\System32\AppleControlPanel.exe to this folder
4. Open Command Prompt and use mt.exe to extract the manifest to this folder using the following command:
mt.exe -inputresource:AppleControlPanel.exe -out:extracted.manifest
5. Edit this file in notepad. On the 6th line replace level=”highestAvailable” with level=”asInvoker”. Be careful not to change anything else here.
6. Place the modified manifest back into control panel using mt with the following command:
mt.exe -outputresource:AppleControlPanel.exe -manifest extracted.manifest
7. Copy and Replace AppleControlPanel.exe back to C:\Windows\System32\AppleControlPanel.exe

This will fix your boot camp control panel problem. (If it doesn’t you’ve set Bootcamp.exe to run as administrator, and you need to lower its permissions back to normal. I had to change the aforementioned setting, use task manager to end Bootcamp.exe, and then restart it before it worked. (This program is found in C:\Program Files\Boot Camp))

Good luck guys. If you need additional help let me know.

Reply
khemarak February 9, 2013

try this will help
c:\Windows\System32> runas /trustlevel:0x20000 applecontrolpanel.exe

Reply
Add Your Reply

Leave a Comment: