Ways around partitioning my drive?

[born_a_ruffian]

Hi, i'm new to the forum, just signed up today! Can anyone help me? I'd like to know if you can use a USB Flash drive as a bootable drive (I think that's the correct terminology?). I'd like to run windows 7 using the USB Flash drive instead of partitioning my onboard drive as it's only 500gb. The USB drive is 128gb so it should have no problem with all the data necessary, I just don't know if I can do it. Can anyone help?

Thanks,

Max.

 

[bobtomay]

Windows does not permit itself to boot from an external drive.

 

[born_a_ruffian]

Windows does not permit itself to boot from an external drive.

Ahhhh, Thanks for your help.

 

[bobtomay]

You could run it in a virtual machine rather than a separate partition depending on what you need from Windows.

 

[born_a_ruffian]

Can you elaborate please? I'm planning to use it for a combination of modelling, light simulations and gaming.

 

[bobtomay]

For the 3 items you just noted, rebooting into Windows would likely provide you much better results, rather than sharing resources with OS X in a VM.

There is also the Enterprise version of windows that can boot from an external, but you'll hate the results if you're attempting to do any gaming from it.

 

[born_a_ruffian]

So I guess I should just suck it up and partition my drive. Cheers.