Is it possible to boot windows from an external drive?

[saltyzoo]

My apologies if this is a stupid question. Up till now I've had no reason to install windows, but now I'd like to boot windows once in a blue moon so if I could do it off an external drive without "corrupting" my MBP's hard drive with any traces of windows that would be ideal.

 

[chscag]

No, not without quite a bit of hacking. Windows normally will only boot from an internal hard drive controlled by the machine BIOS or in the case of SCSI, its controller BIOS.

If you have occasion to boot Windows, why not consider running it as a VM in either Parallels or Fusion instead? No partitioning required and very easy to setup.

Regards.

 

[saltyzoo]

No, not without quite a bit of hacking. Windows normally will only boot from an internal hard drive controlled by the machine BIOS or in the case of SCSI, its controller BIOS.

If you have occasion to boot Windows, why not consider running it as a VM in either Parallels or Fusion instead? No partitioning required and very easy to setup.

Regards.

I have parallels, but I need to boot native for this one.

 

[aki]

No, not without quite a bit of hacking.

yes this is right....there are instructions for how to do external boot of windows stickied somewhere on this forums somewhere i think??i forget where now

i wanted to do it to save some space but its too much work

so the answer is yes but only if u reeeeeeeeally want it

how about a very small bootcamp partition and install your softwares on external hd???if u run xp u can do a pretty small install