Windows On External Hard Drive

[dascorp]

Hello, so today I bought a Toshiba external harddrive (black with green stripes?) and it has 160 GB capacity. I run windows on my Black MacBook, and am starting to run out of room on both (its 1/2 and 1/2 partitions of OS X and XP) Is there a way for me to put my windows onto my external harddrive and then restore my internal to ALL osx? then, I could just plug in the external harddrive and hold down something at start, and then it would boot up in windows? Thanks!

(If this is possible, please just say it's not, but if it is, some detailed instructions would be very very helpful )

 

[neilhart]

For the normal mortal person it is not possible to run windows from an external drive. You can however create a minimum Windows install for the system on your internal drive and keep the rest on an external drive. And if the external drive is FAT32 you will be able to access it from OSX.

If you search the internet you will find directions to hack Windows XP to install on an USB drive. This is a very complex task and the results had disappointing performance on a reasonably fast Core 2 Duo PC. I have not tried this hack on a MAC.

Neil

 

[dascorp]

thanks

they should make a a mobile windows, it would be very helpful to have like a plug and play version of windows, so I could (for instance) go downstairs to my iMac and play Team Fortress 2, right off of the external. I guess this could pose as a threat when it comes to sharing licenses and stuff, but boy, it would make my life much easier

Thanks for the post

 

[Consultant]

Windows limitation. Hard to do.