Boot Camp + External Hard Drive

[Flyer77]

With my MBP, am I able to download boot camp but only put vista on my external hard drive, so that way if it gets a virus it won't be that big of a deal? Or do I have to install Vista internally? If I do install it internally, how easy is it to erase the partition Vista uses and just put that memory back towards my Mac?

Thanks!

 

[R.Youden]

With my MBP, am I able to download boot camp but only put vista on my external hard drive, so that way if it gets a virus it won't be that big of a deal? Or do I have to install Vista internally? If I do install it internally, how easy is it to erase the partition Vista uses and just put that memory back towards my Mac?

Thanks!

You can't install on an external drive, yet.

Uninstalling is straight forward, just run the Bootcamp installer again and select unistall and you get all that lovely HD space back that Vista has stolen!

 

[jdechko]

This has been posted a few times and works with XP SP2 (or it should, I've not personally tested it). Vista should require similar steps - worth a shot, I guess.

Link The steps are fairly easy - it took me less than an hour to create the disk. I plan on trying this on a USB drive I have. Now I just need a Mac to test it on.

Reclaiming the partition space is as easy as running the Bootcamp Assistant again and telling it to restore the disk back to a single partition.