Need help with Mac pro and windows

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Hi all,
I just purchased a 2008 Mac Pro a1186 8 core 2.8 ghz. It's running el capitan on an ssd drive and has another hdd drive for storage. I wanted to know if it was possible to put a hdd drive from my pc into the third bay and boot it by holding the alt key and selecting it. I haven't physically tried this yet and was looking for advice because anything I searched brought up the actual partitioning and installing of windows. I had done that on my MacBook pro, but was curious the process of already having an internal hard drive with windows. Any help and advice would be very appreciated. I'm a first time poster but a longtime lurker of these forums, and most of my questions have been answered by simply googling and being lead to the bright minds here.
 

chscag

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Welcome to the Mac-Forums.

First.. I moved your post here to the correct forum about running Windows on your Mac.

I wanted to know if it was possible to put a hdd drive from my pc into the third bay and boot it by holding the alt key and selecting it.

I don't believe your Windows hard drive will show up as being bootable when you attempt to select it using the Alt or Option key on boot up. Only those drives or partitions that are Mac bootable will show up. The Boot Camp assistant and software renders a Windows partition bootable when it's set up that way on a Mac. But a Windows hard drive alone will not work - at least on your model Mac Pro. The latest Mac Pro has the ability to boot Windows using EFI (Windows 10).
 
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Thank you for the quick response and helping me into the right forum! So I would need to install a new hard drive and partition it in boot camp, install windows, then it would be selectable at boot?
 

chscag

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Thank you for the quick response and helping me into the right forum! So I would need to install a new hard drive and partition it in boot camp, install windows, then it would be selectable at boot?

Yes, you can do it that way or partition off one of your other hard drives using the Boot Camp assistant. But since you have spare bays, the easiest is a new hard drive dedicated to Windows (setup using Boot Camp). Of course if you have no need of special graphics for Windows or otherwise, you could use virtual software to install Windows. VirtualBox from Oracle is free and works well.
 
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Your responses have been extremely helpful! I think I'll go the dedicated hard drive partitioned route because I plan to eventually upgrade the gpu and the current storage drive is only 320gb. Thank you again!
 

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