Migrating Windows drive to nMP

[aleksoctop]

Okay, I got a weird one.

Thus far I've been using a hackintosh for the past X years. I had an installation of Windows7 on it on a separate drive.

Is it possible that if I'd hook up the drive with the installation via Thunderbolt and be able to boot Windows off it?

When bootcamp assistant installs Windows, does it perform some kinda weird mumbo jumbo on the drive? Or do I have to wipe and reinstall?

Thanks

 

[peabo]

I'm able to boot Windows off a Thunderbolt drive, but you may run into issues with it being Windows 7 as Apple only officially supports Windows 8 and upwards.

I used WinClone to copy my Windows partition from my old Mac Pro to the new one and it creates a tiny EFI partition that Windows uses to boot from, but I'm not sure that's the same way that Apple's Bootcamp software does it.

The only problem the small partition caused was having to tell Parallels to use EFI boot mode in order to use the Bootcamp partition as a VM.

 

[xcodeSyn]

I had an installation of Windows7 on it on a separate drive.

Is it possible that if I'd hook up the drive with the installation via Thunderbolt and be able to boot Windows off it?

If you have previously installed Windows 7 using the UEFI boot mode, you could probably put the drive in a Thunderbolt enclosure connected to the nMP after running the "sysprep /generalize" command, and it'd boot up. I have no idea if this would work if you installed Win 7 using the legacy BIOS mode. Note: Without running the "sysprep" command or repair first, it would probably crash due to different hardware drivers used in your Hackintosh.

Boot Camp is more than just Boot Camp Assistant that creates Windows partitions, it also includes the drivers that make Mac hardware run Windows even if you bypass BCA completely. Therefore your more serious problem is that there is no Boot Camp Win 7 drivers support for nMP as mentioned by the previous poster. The nMP has many new hardware components different from previous models, and hunting down the correct Win 7 x64 drivers over the Internet isn't a fun project. Apple isn't a company famous for bending backward for their customers, so until people come up with a Win 7 drivers patch that works for nMP, running Win 7 on a nMP with missing drivers doesn't make much sense.