Windows 7 on external drive, can I dual boot?

I have a HDD (ntfs) out of my old laptop which was running Windows 7, how do I go about booting from this on a Macbook air?

The HDD is currently plugged into the macbook as an external drive, however it is in a read only state. Am I able to use parallels or similar? or at least be able to read AND write to it?

Thanks

I have a HDD (ntfs) out of my old laptop which was running Windows 7, how do I go about booting from this on a Macbook air?

The HDD is currently plugged into the macbook as an external drive, however it is in a read only state. Am I able to use parallels or similar? or at least be able to read AND write to it?

Thanks

It is against Microsofts EULA to use Windows to boot from on any external drives.

Another issue is that Windows would not boot as the drivers would be the ones that it used to boot your old laptop. Windows is not friendly when it comes to moving a hard drive from one machine to another. It is not like OS X.

Lisa

Someone more fluent with Windows on Mac than I am may chime in with better answers but fwiw here is my take on the matter:
1. I don't think you are going to get Windows 7 to boot from an external drive. If it works at all it will be something of a pain to set up. Microsoft anti-piracy measures are designed to prevent someone from running it on an external drive.
2. I think that you could run the installation from within a virtual machine if Windows is installed on an external drive but I am not sure.
3. Your Mac can read ntfs drive with no issues but writing to the ntfs drive requires third-party software. My software of choice for this is from Paragon Software.

ChrisA31:

Please do not double post as that causes confusion. We combined your posts together here.

Thanks for moving that Charlie. By the time I discovered the second thread I think you were already cleaning things up.