Install Win 7 on external drive...

[Deep_Thought]

Hi,

I don't think this falls under the normal installing on external... I have OSX and winXP boot camp on the Air and I want to install 7 on my external, which is formatted as GUID with 5 partitions, my OSX data, Windows data, and 10.5.6 & S.L. install partitions and now a new Windows 7 partition for Windows 7... question is will this work so I can press Option at startup and select the Win7 partition to boot up ala Boot Camp?

Cheers!

Ok, to perhaps make things easier, I'm installing Win7 on my Bootcamp partition on my MacPro, is there any way to then clone that partition to my external drive and boot from that on the MBA?

 

[diamond.g]

Ok, to perhaps make things easier, I'm installing Win7 on my Bootcamp partition on my MacPro, is there any way to then clone that partition to my external drive and boot from that on the MBA?

Yes and no. Yes you technically could boot it that way. No it may not work due to the extreme hardware differences (as Windows, much like OS X doesn't like when you change hardware that much in one go).

 

[Deep_Thought]

But if I prevent windows from booting after the install it shouldn't install all the drivers then i can clone it onto the external and let the setup finish on that....?

 

[diamond.g]

But if I prevent windows from booting after the install it shouldn't install all the drivers then i can clone it onto the external and let the setup finish on that....?

You can give it a try, I don't remember which drivers are initially loaded to get you to the point of the rest of the GUI install. Either it will work, or it doesn't.

 

[Deep_Thought]

Will do.. Whaich is the best way to clone the disk? THrough windows I presume? (Am running VMWare on the MacPro as well so have a WinXP environment..)

 

[diamond.g]

Will do.. Whaich is the best way to clone the disk? THrough windows I presume? (Am running VMWare on the MacPro as well so have a WinXP environment..)

Can superduper clone a windows drive? If so that would work just fine...

 

[Deep_Thought]

Nope super duper won't...

Just trying to copy it to a FAT32 partition made active with XP and copying using finder...

WIll report back if it works or not...

No joy... rEFIt comes up saying that it cannot load USB legacy drivers....

 

[diamond.g]

Can you try setting up another VM, but this time make the whole drive (the usb one) the disk for VM to use? So instead of creating a vhd it just "raw writes" everything the the disk. In theory you would be able to boot to the disk (much like you can create a VM from a bootcamp partition).

 

[Deep_Thought]

Yeah can do... do you have a guide for ths anywhere?

Cheers

 

[diamond.g]

Yeah can do... do you have a guide for ths anywhere?

Cheers

Sadly, no. To be honest I am not even sure the Mac version of VMWare even allows you to do that.

 

[ColinEC]

Yeah can do... do you have a guide for ths anywhere?

Cheers

I used VMWare to install Windows 7 on an iMac with a broken superdrive and wrote a tutorial on how to do it here:

https://forums.macrumors.com/posts/6986060/

If you edit the instructions a bit you might be able to install W7 on your external drive. However, I was never able to boot from the installation of Windows I installed via VMWare. For some reason, I couldn't figure out how to set the partition as active (however you may have better luck).


Based off of information found from different Google searches, it may be too difficult to install Windows 7 on an external drive. I haven't found any success stories. There is an interesting post about someone trying to use a virtual machine to install the OS on an external drive, but with no avail: http://blog.beausanders.com/?q=node/6

You might be better off installing it directly on your internal HD, unfortunately.