Will this work or not? It would be really helpful to know that cause then I wouldnt be so afraid with the whole risking my pretty pretty 20" iMac's good health and fortune....
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Using a Firewire Drive to boot windows from
- Thread starter ModestPenguin
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My initial try
My initail try is I could get the boot loader to work off the firewire drive. But I could not get the drive itself to be found when installing XP. Could be that there is no firewire driver at that point for hard drive.
I'll try to dive into it later when I have more time to experiment.
ModestPenguin said:Will this work or not? It would be really helpful to know that cause then I wouldnt be so afraid with the whole risking my pretty pretty 20" iMac's good health and fortune....
My initail try is I could get the boot loader to work off the firewire drive. But I could not get the drive itself to be found when installing XP. Could be that there is no firewire driver at that point for hard drive.
I'll try to dive into it later when I have more time to experiment.
Other posts have suggested that this won't work.ModestPenguin said:Will this work or not? It would be really helpful to know that cause then I wouldnt be so afraid with the whole risking my pretty pretty 20" iMac's good health and fortune....
This makes me wonder if the boot selector will still let you boot OS X from a FW drive... This way you could put Windows on the internal drive and boot OS X on the external...
Anyhow, it doesn't take a huge partition to boot Windows, and once booted I suspect it can see external drives where you can keep your apps & docs.
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if it makes you feel any better, as soon asyou get XP installed.. you just start drooling after graphics drivers.. it's a bitter sweet victory. i've bricked my Windows partition twice now trying to hack up some drivers.. i quit until someone else does it
So the XP installer does NOT see a FW drive? Darn. The bootloader does though, right? so If I can install XP on a ext. drive (using a neighbors PC... he owes me ) then theoretically it should work, right?
) then theoretically it should work, right?
Using a neighbors computer to install windows may cause problems. Usually Windows gets upset if you switch major system components on it. Its going to look for the motherboard (chipsets and serial number) and CPU in your neighbors computer when loading on the Mac. Though if you carefully clean out drivers loaded for your neighbors computer and reset the system registry it should work. Also wait to activate your windows license when the FW drive is installed on the Mac.
edit: Also have all of your neighbors hard drives removed as the windows install will put some startup files on the internal drive on your neighbors computer. It wouldn't hurt their machine in any way but you would have to repair the Master Boot Record on the external. I forget the name of what else would need to be repaired, but the commands for repairs in Windows recovery console would be 'fixmbr' and 'fixboot'.
edit: Also have all of your neighbors hard drives removed as the windows install will put some startup files on the internal drive on your neighbors computer. It wouldn't hurt their machine in any way but you would have to repair the Master Boot Record on the external. I forget the name of what else would need to be repaired, but the commands for repairs in Windows recovery console would be 'fixmbr' and 'fixboot'.
Why?
Yeah, why is that? Is it known yet why the 20" iMac won't play along? Is it different in any way from the 17" one? Well, except for the processor. Is the graphics card different in any way? What is the difference between the two iMac models?!...jamesmcd said:
The way USB booting "usually" works on Windows PCs is that the USB mass storage drivers are in the BIOS, and the bootloader just sees them as regular internal drives.ECM said:
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Kingsly said:So the XP installer does NOT see a FW drive? Darn. The bootloader does though, right? so If I can install XP on a ext. drive (using a neighbors PC... he owes me
Nope, this won't work. You can't install Windows XP to an external Firewire drive at all. The Windows installer will reboot the computer and then fail to detect the FW drive.
The only thing that could come close to working is removing the external drive from its case, connecting it internally, installing Windows, and putting the drive back in the case, and boot the Mac via Firewire. The Windows bootloader would probably be messed up, but you might be able to coax it into behaving. That's just an outside shot, though. Also, when installing Windows on the PC, make sure that once you've finished and booted into Windows, go into device manager and delete everything (say no when it asks you to restart). Connect it to the Mac without rebooting the Windows drive, and it will then redetect the new hardware, assuming you can get it to boot at all.
Okay thanks, though I think Im going to wait until they work out all the bugs like melting MBP's!
How to boot windows off an external USB-drive
Here is how you can modify your windows installation disc so it can install and boot off an external USB drive.
http://www.ngine.de/index.jsp?pageid=4176
Someone got it working on a Macbook pro:
http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/archives/apr06/041706.html#S20998
Hopefully someone could modify the installation even more and enable boot from firewire.
Here is how you can modify your windows installation disc so it can install and boot off an external USB drive.
http://www.ngine.de/index.jsp?pageid=4176
Someone got it working on a Macbook pro:
http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/archives/apr06/041706.html#S20998
Hopefully someone could modify the installation even more and enable boot from firewire.
I had posted the ngine link in an earlier thread on booting from external drives, glad to see someone verified that it actually works with an MBP!staed said:
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Ok, got a little bit of a dump-a-roo here...
I was thinking about this booting windows from a firewire drive thing, and well... How is this any different then using a RAID card for a Windows install. I mean, you can slipstream drivers for a RAID card into the install disc, so why couldn't you do the same for a firewire controller? I am not sure if this would work, but it seems to be something that people have kinda overlooked. I will give it a shot later in the year when I can afford to get a FireWire drive. I think that this could work if done similar to booting from a RAID card.
I was thinking about this booting windows from a firewire drive thing, and well... How is this any different then using a RAID card for a Windows install. I mean, you can slipstream drivers for a RAID card into the install disc, so why couldn't you do the same for a firewire controller? I am not sure if this would work, but it seems to be something that people have kinda overlooked. I will give it a shot later in the year when I can afford to get a FireWire drive. I think that this could work if done similar to booting from a RAID card.
You are right, it's not any different than booting from any non-standard storage device that needs custom drivers.
Trouble is, Windows doesn't ship with the appropriate drivers and I have not found any generic Firewire storage drivers. If you find any, please post and the world will be very happy!
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Windows won't install natively to a FireWire drive without certain BIOS extensions which make the external FW drives look like an internal drive.
Also, as far I have been able to tell FW has the same problem as USB boot in that the FireWire drivers are initialized during boot causing your boot volume to go offline, which is not a good thing.
Have you found something different? Links please.
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Also, as far I have been able to tell FW has the same problem as USB boot in that the FireWire drivers are initialized during boot causing your boot volume to go offline, which is not a good thing.
Have you found something different? Links please.
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