BootCamp and External Hardrive

wesley7777 · Sep 20, 2007

I have to run vista for one of my college classes, but i really don't want to put it on my internal hard drive. Would it be possible to buy an external hard drive, connect with firewire, and use bootcamp install it on the external and boot it from there. So that i would have to hard drives each running its own operating system. Or would this fail horrible?

goobimama · Sep 21, 2007

You cannot install on an external drive because of a limitation of Windows not being able to do that. There is a method, but it is complicated and might bugger up your OS X installation.

wesley7777 · Sep 21, 2007

goobimama said:
You cannot install on an external drive because of a limitation of Windows not being able to do that. There is a method, but it is complicated and might bugger up your OS X installation.

Hmmm that is what i was afraid, now what to do.......

goobimama · Sep 21, 2007

It is in fact a limitation of Windows that it can't be installed on an external device.

Why can't you just use bootcamp the normal way? You can use Macdrive to access the OS X partition from Windows and NTFS for Mac to use the Windows partition from Mac....

voided3 · Sep 21, 2007

What kind of setup are you running? It may not be too expensive to get a larger hard drive if space is the issue depending on what kind of computer it is. Also, if what you need to run on Vista doesn't need 3D acceleration, you can always use VMware Fusion or Virtualbox and make a virtual machine of Vista and save it's disk image to the external. I do that with XP and Ubuntu on my MBP by using an eSATA adapter and a 500GB external. It's very fast that way too if you have the option of using Firewire 800 or eSATA, but firewire 400 does work too; i've done that before. Just make sure you have at least 2GB of ram if you're going to run Vista externally since it's a hog.

wesley7777 · Sep 21, 2007

voided3 said:
What kind of setup are you running? It may not be too expensive to get a larger hard drive if space is the issue depending on what kind of computer it is. Also, if what you need to run on Vista doesn't need 3D acceleration, you can always use VMware Fusion or Virtualbox and make a virtual machine of Vista and save it's disk image to the external. I do that with XP and Ubuntu on my MBP by using an eSATA adapter and a 500GB external. It's very fast that way too if you have the option of using Firewire 800 or eSATA, but firewire 400 does work too; i've done that before. Just make sure you have at least 2GB of ram if you're going to run Vista externally since it's a hog.

I have a macbook pro with 2GB and a 160GB hard drive. See i am an engineering major, so i have to be able to run the designing programs. That is my problem right now.

goobimama · Sep 21, 2007

Well what about XP? It takes just about 1.5GB against Vista's 10GB of space....should be better in your case...