Using old laptop HD for bootcamp

I have a laptop Hd from my previous HP laptop that I fried the motherboard on. I would like to use this HD with bootcamp. Is that even possible?

Yes, you can do that.

This old hard drive has windows already installed and is attached to my macbook pro via usb. How would I go about running bootcamp with this HD

You can't. Boot Camp can only be used to install Windows on an internal drive in your Mac.

chscag said:

You can't. Boot Camp can only be used to install Windows on an internal drive in your Mac.

Click to expand...

That's right. Tried it recently and it does not work. It works as a virtual machine IIRC.

So, bootcamp will not recognize the usb HD to boot windows. Are there any programs that will allow me to still use this HD to run windows other than buying a new PC

Yes. I did it recently using VMWare Fusion but do not remember the exact steps. If I remember correctly the software walks you through the process. Here's an example of the setup for Parallels. This article is a few years old so I suggest using the current version.
How To Run a Parallels Virtual Machine from an External USB Drive | Mac|Life