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Bootcamp Windows 10 from External Drive?

Washac said:
I cannot assist with your problem but you are aware the person who posted that guide has not been on the forums for 2 years and when I click on his name link in your post it says user not available.
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Yes I am aware that the person in question has not been on the forums for many years. But I am speaking towards the method used, which was the command prompt "DISM" to install Windows and setup the UEFI boot, on top of that I also tried Win2USB which some people here say worked..

I want fix this stupid "USB3Driver blue screen of death".
 

Not bootcamp but it's windows on external drive.

I think on my iMac I used winclone to migrate to an external ssd.
 
Does no one have an idea on how to solve the "USB3Driver" BSOD error?

BSOD = Blue Screen Of Death
 
I was able to get this to work but after hours of trying.. I am not at all able to update from Anniversary to Creator's !!

I was getting some errors.. but then using the Microsoft Troubleshooter the errors went away.. but now am getting another error saying "cannot install on a usb flash storage using setup"

anyone got this to work somehow??
 
I have had a bad experience with Winclone 6 & Win 10 + bootcamp .. I 've used Winclone 5 and that was OK. Over a period of time I created a series of images but then had to regress. Most of the earlier images either would not load or partially loaded. I am now rebuilding my Bootcamp partition, my data was backed up elsewhere. To have such a degree of failure ( 6 images) makes me doubt the viability of the package as a back up solution - what other are there ( that work)?
 
NazgulRR said:
Has anyone figured out yet how to update the Windows on a USB3-SSD to a newer version, e.g. 1511->1607, without wiping the drive and re-installing the whole thing - that is, by keeping your apps etc. intact as if it was a PC?

Would perhaps temporarily plugging the SSD with Windows on it via SATA to a PC just to update it work? Or would that break anything once you brought it back to use on a Mac via USB3?
Click to expand...

What problem are you having?
I've updated Windows 10 on my USB-3 many times.
I even installed Windows 10 via an update. My original USB-3 installation was Windows 8 and then I upgraded to 10 while booted to the USB.
You just have to be present during the entire operation and manually select the USB drive every time Windows reboots.
 
Gjwilly said:
What problem are you having?
I've updated Windows 10 on my USB-3 many times.
I even installed Windows 10 via an update. My original USB-3 installation was Windows 8 and then I upgraded to 10 while booted to the USB.
You just have to be present during the entire operation and manually select the USB drive every time Windows reboots.
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Windows refuses an upgrade in place whilst it is booted up from a USB drive. Im not sure I took a screenprint, but its a well known restriction.

I did find a workaround using Hyper-V virtualisation on a second PC.
 
NazgulRR said:
Windows refuses an upgrade in place whilst it is booted up from a USB drive. Im not sure I took a screenprint, but its a well known restriction.

I did find a workaround using Hyper-V virtualisation on a second PC.
Click to expand...

If you attach a USB drive to a computer already running Windows, yes, Windows will refuse to install or upgrade on to that external drive.
If you boot from the USB then as far as Windows knows, that USB is a normal internal hard drive. At least that's what I've found.
Here's where I did my initial install.
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/efi-install-of-windows-10-on-external-usb3-drive.1909911/
 
Last edited:
Gjwilly said:
If you boot from the USB then as far as Windows knows, that USB is a normal internal hard drive. At least that's what I've found.
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Yeah, this wasn't the case with my install. I used the same instructions for the install.

I use Samsung SSD EVO drive as the W2GO drive and I connect it to the mac via SATA-USB3 cable.

Minor Windows 10 updates are fine, bigger ones, such as the one from 1511->1607, do not. It knows it is being booted from a USB drive. The fact that it is a Samsung EVO SSD drive didn't fool it into not being usb-attached storage.

Weird.
 
Those with successful Windows 10 external setups, any able to use the boot into MacOS bootcamp feature? Works from the Mac side on my setup, but the windows side just reboots into windows.

Samsung T5 is pretty close to internal Sata III SSD in speeds, works well.
 
Crash0veride said:
Those with successful Windows 10 external setups, any able to use the boot into MacOS bootcamp feature? Works from the Mac side on my setup, but the windows side just reboots into windows.

Samsung T5 is pretty close to internal Sata III SSD in speeds, works well.
Click to expand...

Mine works booting back to OS X from Windows 10. However, depending on the system, if several bootable disks (i.e. a bootable clone of my boot SSD) exists on an "internal" drive where the OS X SSD is on a "external" PCIe drive, it seems to prioritize to the "internal" clone disk drive with the simple OS X selection. I have to go to the Control Panel to select the correct SSD boot device for OS X. This is on a cMacPro.

On a iMac where OS X is "internal" and Windows 10 and the bootable clone are both "external", it works as expected with the simple button selection.

On another iMac where OS X and Windows 10 are both present on the internal SSD, and the bootable clone disk is external, it also works as expected.

Hope this helps .... confusing as it is ... ;)
 
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I'm very interested in this topic.
But I'd like some advice to understand if it would be feasable on my old MBP 17 2007 ( MacBookPro3,1) which is just EFI as far as I can say.

At present I've two internal hdds one SSD and the old spinning one in the optical bay, and would like to install Windows 7.
 
Just to contribute, I successfully installed WIN 10 on an external USB3 drive BIOS MODE (I have a mid 2012 15rmbp) after various tries...
The best method is to use WINtoUSB, I formatted the drive with MBR scheme creating two volumes, "SYSTEM" fat32 500mb and Bootcamp NTFS for the installation, this was indicated by wintousb support guide, my only concern is that the system partition is mounted as the regular Bootcamp drive under parallels and when I boot I see "EFI Boot" and "Bootcamp", and only choosing the latter the system starts, I don't know if there is another way to create a system partition. Anyway after formatting, you chose the ISO into WINtoUSB and select system + bootcamp partitions, it installs the SO and everything is working, even windows update and every driver including audio and brightness control, the only "issue" is that Bootcamp Control Panel gives an error when opening, but it isn't needed as I press alt key when booting to chose OSX or windows
 
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