Installing Windows 7 on external drive

[whiteplainsny]

Hey, I'm new to the forum. I started a project yesterday, thinking it would be simple. Now im not sure if it will even work! Im trying to install Windows 7 on a Western Digital 750 GB external drive. The idea was that when I wanted to use Windows, I could just boot to the drive. Unfortunately, I have a couple issues. It says that windows cannot be installed on a disk connected through USB and that it must be formatted NTFS. I cant find an option to format it NTFS on mac, only FAT32. Im on a 2007 Intel Macbook.
Hoping not to hear that it isn't possible. Any help?

 

[chscag]

Even if you did format that external disk to NTFS, (and you can with the Windows Disk Manager software) you still would not be able to install Windows 7 to an external disk. It's a Microsoft restriction.

Regards.

 

[whiteplainsny]

Thank you. Do you think I should go with Boot Camp or a Virtual Machine? I just plan to run the OS on my computer and store files on the external disk i was going to use to run it.

 

[Slydude]

I think whether you use Boot Camp. a virtual machine, or both to run Windows will depend a lot upon what you are planing to do. Any intensive gaming such as WoW would probably be best run under Boot Camp if you are running the PC version. Less intensive operations run fine as a virtual machine.

The current versions of Parallels and Fusion allow you to in most circumstances use the Boot Camp partition as the basis for your virtual machine. This keeps you from having to run/maintain two Windows installations.