Win 7 on HDD

I recently received a external hard drive for my birthday (today ) and I downloaded the Windows 7 RC. Is there a way I can put that on my HDD and then boot from that so I can keep my mac OSX on my internal drive and Window 7 on my external drive?

It is very difficult to get windows to boot from an external. The onky easy way is to use virtualisation and store the virtual hard disk on the external

Products like VirtualBox, Parallels and WMWare Fusion can do that

As Louishen says, this is only possible using a virtual machine. That said, Windows 7 has a pretty small footprint, so you could use BootCamp to free up 5GB or so on your main drive, and use the external for storage - this should work fine.

Running the VM on an external, while very much possible, will result in a greater performance hit on top of what you might experience anyway because of virtualization. In other words, VMs will be slower that running on native hardware and running it off of an external is only going to exacerbate the problem. I've done it before (booted a VM off of an external) and it's manageable but not useful for anything beyond simple tasks.

What do you plan to do with your Windows install? If your needs are not dependent on resource intensive or 3D application use, a VM might suit your needs. Also, happy birthday.

I will be doing a lot of coding and minimal gaming because of course, I have a mac and the specs are not that great.


So should I use a CD or a DVD disc to burn the ISO to?

IIRC, the Win 7 RC was well over 700MB so you will need a DVD.

If you're going to game, virtualization won't work. 3D support is currently in its infancy so even if the game did work, it probably won't work very well. This is of course assuming the games you play are 3D.

I have another problem. I burned the ISO to a DVD and it burned sucessfully. However when I boot from the disc it says

1.

2.

Select Boot type:

or something like that but when it does that it wont let me do ANYTHING