Installing Windows on the second internal drive

[akadmon]

I'd rather keep OSX and Windows on seperate drives. Can someone confirm that Bootcamp allows installation of Windows on the second internal drive in a Mac Pro?

 

[akadmon]

Anyone? I've posted this question on 3 Mac sites, and no luck!

I find it hard to believe no one knows the answer, no one ever wanted to do this.

 

[akadmon]

This thread is closed

Well. I'm embarrassed (to say he least). I should have read the manual before asking (who does anyway? ) The answer is YES. It's right there on page 7!

 

[DXoverDY]

Note this won't work unless it's one of the SATA drives. I have a second drive plugged into the IDE port under the superdrive and it won't let me install on that.

 

[Nick T.]

Question:

Once Windows is installed on the second drive, could that drive be taken out and installed in a SATA capable PC and used to boot the PC?

Obviously you'd get a lot of "found new hardware" dialog boxes.

 

[balamw]

Obviously you'd get a lot of "found new hardware" dialog boxes.

And, if you're using XP or Vista your activation would be invalidated and you would most likely have to call Microsoft within 30 days to reactivate it and keep using it.

Overall there are many reasons why this is not advisable. For one thing, your install might want a different hardware abstraction layer (HAL) than the one it came from, and might ultimately prove unstable.

That said, I did move an NT 4.0/Exchange 5.5 server from one box to another by doing a drive transplant and we kept on using that system for years though it did have some intermittent instability issues that may have been tied to that.

It sure would make life easy if Windows would be able to boot off external drives on relatively random hardware (like Linux or OS X are capable of doing), but it can't in its native state.

B