Boot Camp install of Win 7 TO USB external drive?

Hi,
I recently bought a 32 GB USB thumb drive. I was able to install a full copy of SL on the drive and use it to boot several different Macs in my household -- it's a little slow, but it works fine. The procedure was dead simple -- format the drive and away you go.
I cannot, for the life of me, figure out how to do the same thing with Boot Camp/Windows, i.e. install a copy of Windows on the USB thumb drive such that it will boot and run on a Mac.
I read somewhere else here that it isn't possible -- that Boot Camp can only run on an internal drive. I guess my question is: if all my Macs can install and boot OSX from an external USB drive, why isn't it possible to the same with Windows?
(As I type this it occurs that I didn't try booting the Mac from the USB drive, partitioning the thumb drive in Boot Camp and installing Windows from there. It would be pretty slow going, but maybe that's a solution?)
Thanks for any/all illumination!

From my days using ThinkPads (long, long ago) I remember doing flash updates to the BIOS. The updates came from IBM, not Microsoft (so I assume the BIOS was hardware-based, not software (i.e. Windows o/s) based.
That suggests (to me, anyway!) that something in the Mac motherboard prevents installing Windows on an external drive (but allows OSX to be so-installed).
I've also read the Macs use "open firmware" instead of BIOS and that open firmware is, to some degree, programmable (as in programmable to allow Win to boot from a USB drive).
Am I on the right track or am I completely, totally, wrong?! (I'm 'way over my head here).

Similar Messages

Boot Camp sees my internal SSD as an external drive - can't install Windows 7

I've just replaced my old 1TB drive on my Mac Pro (mid 2010) with a 1TB Samsung 840 EVO. To get the best speed I've installed it using the Sonnet Tempo PCIe interface. I performed a fresh install of Mavericks 10.9.1 and the system absolutely flies.
However, I wanted to also install Windows 7 but Boot Camp Assistant will not allow me to do this. It warns....
You cannot partition an external disk, a RAID disk or an internal disk on which FileVault encryption is in progress.
When I look through the system information, my SSD is reported as an external drive - which is why I guess BCA refuses to partition it (and ghosts out the option to install Windows 7 or later version.
Here's the system information under storage...
MAC SSD:
Available:          941.47 GB (941,471,612,928 bytes)
Capacity:          999.35 GB (999,345,127,424 bytes)
Mount Point:          /
File System:          Journaled HFS+
Writable:          Yes
Ignore Ownership:          No
BSD Name:          disk0s2
Volume UUID:          DED0438B-7A12-3AB0-8E6D-E6911C595CA2
Physical Drive:
Media Name:          Samsung SSD 840 EVO 1TB Media
Medium Type:          SSD
Protocol:          SATA
Internal:          No
Partition Map Type:          GPT (GUID Partition Table)
S.M.A.R.T. Status:          Verified
So my questions are... Why does OSX identify it as an external drive? Is it because of the PCIe interface? And, more importantly, how can I get around this to allow me to install Windows 7? Could I temporarily remove the PCIe card and install the SSD in a standard drive bay and then run BCA? Any ideas???
Thanks.

Kappy is dead on with 1 more tweak ... remove the PCI card, and put the SSD back onto a normal drive bay and fully install Windows.
Then, put the empty PCI card back into the machine and boot into both OSX and Windows ... both OSs should work just fine.
Now, put the SSD onto the PCI sled and test both OSs.

Boot Camp Installation: Definition of, and insights into "External Drives"?

I'm recovering from a logic board failure. One casualty was that I lost my prior Boot Camp installation of Windows on my main internal hard drive. :-( Wondering if I can install Windows anywhere other than the main internal hard drive so I can maximize space on my OSX main internal drive?
From what I've gathered, installing Windows 7 Boot Camp is very difficult (and perhaps impossible?) on an external hard drive. However, what's not entirely clear is what constitutes an "external drive".
Questions:
1. Can I install a bootable installation of Windows 7 using Boot Camp (obviously not running OSX in this scenario) on either the:
A) Data Doubler 7,200 drive
or
B) Express Card 34 SSD drive
2. Can I also install Parallels (on the main internal OSX drive), then while in OSX launch (a much slower) Windows from location A or B?
Context:
1. On a late 2011 MBP 17' (version 8,3), I've replaced the stock hard drive (7,200 rpm) with a much faster OWC SSD Drive. (Awesome upgrade, btw!)
2. The internal apple dvd device was removed and the stock hard drive was inserted in this location using OWC Data Doubler. (Also, very nice.) An extra challenge here is that the dvd drive is now an external device. I have a Windows 7 install disc, but I'm not sure if it will be recognized during the installation process?
3. This model MBP has an ExpressCard 34 slot, for which I can buy an SSD drive. Never used this slot and have read mixed reports on boot ability.
Any and all insights greatly appreciated!

Yoüf wrote:
Many thanks for the helpful response, Loner T. I think I've got it. To install Windows through BCA on the Optibay drive, I temporarily move it to the main SATA bay. I can then temporarily put the DVD drive back in the Optibay. So here's a question: In doing this, I would no longer have an OSX boot drive (since I'm temporarily removing my OSX boot SSD). It's been a while since I used BCA, so my memory is fuzzy (sorry), but does the BCA process need a working OSX install on the drive in the SATA bay?
The SSD with OSX boot is normally (for your specific scenario) kept in an external enclosure (USB/FW/TB) to boot from and run BC and partition the disk in the main SATA bay.
You mention that modifying the BC info.plist causes issues. I lost you a little here. Using the method you describe (move the Optibay drive to the SATA location, run BCA to install Windows, then move the drive back to the Optibay location), does the BC info.plist need to be modified or not? If yes, a few more details would be welcomed. If not, what prompted this thought?
If you have a functional Optical drive and the designated Windows-to-be in the proper bays, the BC info.plist modifications are unnecessary, and can cause other grief, and are best avoided.
Thanks also for the bleeptobleep post. It says to use a USB3/Thunderbolt external drive (which I do have); however, my MBP (version 8,3) only has USB2 ports. I realize that a USB2 port will read a USB3 external drive, but was wondering if this limitation is a deal breaker for a bootable Windows system, or if it just means that things will be really, really, tragically slow due to low transfer rates. Any idea on this aspect?
USB3 can cause problems for Windows 7 installer, bot not as many issues for Windows 8+. It is better to stick to USB2, but you are correct it will be slow. OSX can boot and will use RAM much more aggressively, unless it has to go back to the USB (2/3) when things may give you a beach ball. Windows 7/8 are less friendly for caching the whole OS and applications in RAM, and may be slower. A TB connection is much faster (TB2 even better).
BTW: Bummer that the ExpressCard slot can't work for booting into Windows. That would be pretty slick. I've seen some older posts by folks who were once able to do this, but seemingly only with early versions of OSX. Apparently newer OSX versions either did away with this feature, or seriously complicated the process. Would love to find a workaround if one exists.
You can test it, but may have some issues finding storage for ECards.
(Dumb question: on this forum, how are you threading comments into a quoted block of text? Are you using HTML or is there some easier way?)(((
Under the "Reply" bar at the top, there is an icon with a "quote" and a "speech" bubble, which is used to quote posts. You can either quote from a previous post, or select a line (or more) of text and click on that icon.

Boot Camp with Win 8 Can't See The USB External Drive [MBR with NTFS, Fat32, HFS Partitions]

Hi. When I boot to Boot Camp with the latest Apple Windows Support drivers can't see my USB Flash Drive, DVD and OS X volumes but not my USB external drive that has an MBR partition scheme (using iPartition from GUID) and in there it has different volumes [HFS when I boot to Snow Leopard, Fat32, NTFS]. What can I do with Boot Camp to make it see my USB external drive and why isn't it seeing the USB when it can see the USB flash drive both use USB?
Thank you in advance.
God bless.

Buy Paragon NTFS for OS X $20.

Installing Windows 7 with boot camp as whole partition on 2nd internal hard drive

Hi all,
I am unsure what is the recent changes with Apple boot camp. But when I used boot camp utilitiy on my Mac Pro (Mid 2010) to install windows 7 64 bits. It would not install and created a whole lot of problems.
After I initialise the process to install windows 7 using boot camp utilities, I chose the option to create a single partition to installl windows 7 on my secondary internal hard drive (1TB). After I restarted my Mac Pro and started the Windows 7 installation process, I was unable to install Windows 7 on the BOOTCAMP partition created by the boot camp utilitiy. I got an error something about Windows cannot be installed on the selected forum because the driver contained GPT details.
I tried to format the BOOTCAMP partition, but it ended up with errors. I tried to delete and recreate the BOOTCAMP partition in Windows setup, but failed with errors again. As I could not go any further with the Windows 7 installation, I had to hard reset my Mac Pro and tried to reboot back into Mac OS X Lion and that's when the nightmare begin.
Not only I could not boot into OS X, I could not use any of the startup key combinations (i.e. Hold option key to select start up disk, option + R to boot the lion recovery drive, not boot from any external firewire drive installed with OS X Lion). Basically none of the key combinations worked except for the holdingi F12 and mouse key to eject CD.
The only thing I could boot the Mac Pro with is the windows installation CD and Linux Ubuntu Raring Distro. I can install the ubuntu distro without any issue. However, I could not boot my mac pro back into OS X as Linux does not support bootcamp. The only way I could use Mac OS X Lion again is to delete the partition OS X Lion was installed on, and then I was be able to install Windows 7 without any issue.
After installing windows 7 I would have to download boot camp and then use the boot camp control panel to restart in the Mac Pro installation DVD and I will have to reinstall OS X again. After installing OS X, I went to System Preference and tried to select Windows 7 as startup disc. But I failed to as it says "Windows 7" Was installed via another utility. I would have to erase the partition and reinstall Windows 7 again using bootcamp utility. If I try to install windows 7 again, the horror I described above repeats again.
From my understanding, the Boot camp utility creates a new EFI bootrom with Master Boot Record (MBR) in FAT32 format. Therefore I could not boot back into Mac OS X without using boot camp in windows 7 as none of the boot combinations key worked.
I want to ask if anyone is experiencing the same issue as i do, and if there are any solutions to the problem I am experiencing. I never had such issue before. I was able to install Windows 7 on my 2ndary internal hard drive without issue using boot camp. I don't what has changed. I have googled for solution, I only found something related to XOM but nothing else.
If anyone can provide me with any help in regards to installing Windows 7 as a whole partition on a secondary internal hard drive. It'd be grealy appreciated. Thank you in advance.

If you have driver issue, just pre-download the boot camp drivers and save them on an external drive or burn them onto a cd, you will be able to load drivers via the advanced installation option during windows setup, that is if your osx partition isn't actively preventing you from installing win7 on the BOOTCAMP Partition created by boot camp assistant, I find this rather ironic, took me 3 days to figure out this issue, I was stuck without being able to boot into anything beside the windows cd, which wasn't even helpful as I could not install windows as I did not want to delete my osx partition. I lost all my data becsuse of it, as I had no idea what was going on. I tried to recover the partition using testdisk, hfsprogs and gparted in ubuntu life cd but they dont support HFS+. As I could not access osx terminal (couldn't even boot into osx installation dvd with that dreaded MBR created by boot csmp). I could not use pdisk in terminal to restore the osx partition map. Though luck for me. Called applecare and they had no idea what the problem was, and as usual they orgsnised for hard drive replacement. But it was clearly a software issue.
They will have to fix bay2 for me as I can no longer detect any hard disk connected to that bay.

Failed boot camp install - how to remove windows partition?

Hi There,
After a failed boot camp install, boot camp no longer sees (or can remove) a windows partition - Disk Utility can't seem to remove it and if I use:
$ diskutil list
It shows up as partition 5 "Microsoft Reserved"
I also have a portion of free space that I can't seem to incorporate back into the main OSX partition - how do I remove the windows partition and make the drive a single OSX drive again?
Any help would be much appreciated
Cheers
Ben
- New Mac Pro
- Installing onto internal 1 TB SSD
- 10.9.3
- Windows 8.1

Just incase others have this issue, this wasn't caused by using Disk Utility (Disk Utility couldn't remove the partition anyway) it was caused by repeatedly trying to format the Boot Camp partition using the Windows installer when Windows refused to install.
The solution is an Apple tech note (I can no longer find it sorry) that sates that no other hard drives besides the internal HD and the Windows USB flash drive can be connected while installing windows.
Cheers

I have a copy of Windows 7, and I am trying to bring up Boot Camp on my MacBook with Snow Leopard. But my Snow Leopard install disk is too old for Windows 7, so attempted Boot Camp install of drivers fails.

I have a copy of Windows 7, and I am trying to bring up Boot Camp on my MacBook with Snow Leopard. But my Snow Leopard install disk is too old for Windows 7, so attempted Boot Camp install of drivers fails.
I have hand-installed the NVidia graphics driver, and I have keyboard, minimal trackpad, and hardwire to internet all working. So the WIndows machine is usable. But I am hurting for wi-fi, better trackpad, and whatever else is delivered by Boot Camp. I can't use any of the Boot Camp upgrades because I do not have XP or Vista.

While we all have MacBooks in this forum not all of us use Boot Camp. There's a Boot Camp Support Community where everybody uses Boot Camp. You should also post this question there.
https://discussions.apple.com/community/windows_software/boot_camp

New Macbook Pro retina boot camp install issue - Windows 7

Trying to complete a boot camp install but can't get past creating a partition. I am able to download the windows drivers through boot camp, it burns them to a DVD, verifies the DVD (couldn't use CD-R as it kept saying burn failure after verifying files) and then takes me to the make a partition page. When i click install the partition, it pops up saying "can't find the installer disc" and wants me to put one in the super drive. What gives? I have that disc in the drive, also tried the Windows 7 disc and got the same error. So basically I can't create a partition to install windows 7 that I have.
Any thoughts?

The disk was from my other PC system, however it is an OEM upgrade disc. Maybe that is the problem but if that is the case why did it work when I installed it through VMware and it worked fine? The disc can be used as a self full install of windows 7. I have also it on another PC with no issues. Trying to convert to Mac finally but this is causing a hiccup.
The next question then is do I really need to go the boot camp way? I only need it to run quickbooks (need windows version for reasons) and a couple of other programs but thought it may run better as a boot camp install rather than VM plus I couldn't figure out how to reduce the size of the partition that VM installs, it takes too much space from me for no reason (60Gb).
Thanks for any input.

Boot camp install would error out

I had multiple issues as well.
When I first tried to install 8.1 full as a fresh boot camp install it would error out and say that the required files were not there to install.
Then I would try it again and it would then get close to finishing and say it cant change the boot order and fail.
Apple please fix as soon as possible.
<Re-Titled By Host>

What's happening here is that the Windows installation, for whatever reason, is not booting properly. It is also set as your default boot system. To change this, reboot your mac while holding down the Option/Alt key. After awhile you will be presented with two icons, one for OS X and the other for Windows. Select OS X and then press Enter.
OS X will boot. Go to System Preferences >> Startup Disk and then select your OS X partition and this won't happen anymore.

Yosemite boot camp install on /separate/ drive?

i have an existing windows 7 boot camp install that resides on a drive in my 2006 mac pro with my LION OS.
i now have a 2012 mac pro.
should i install windows 7 with boot camp on a SEPARATE drive or can i put it on a partition on the same drive as yosemite?
thanks

OK. thank you.
so i /like/ the idea of having an internal CLONE of my OS in bay 1 on the drive in bay 2.
in the past i have set this to happen nightly and i use WinClone (thanks hatter) to create a BACKUP of the Boot Camp install of Windows 7 and i drop this backup on the DESKTOP. this way i have a BACKUP of Windows on my boot OS and i also have one on the CLONE.
just to confirm - no reason as far as you are concerned to change this?

Should my boot camp install see my OSX drives?

HI folks. I"m trying to run Windows 7 under boot camp and thought that a Windows boot camp install could see my mac partitions so I could access the same data when I boot to my mac or my windows 7 boot camp partition. They are formatted OSX Extended Journaled. Should I be able to see them? Thanks.

Windows 7 uses a NTFS formatted file system. OSx uses a Mac only file system, so the answer is you can't without third party tools. Search these forums or search Google. Your question has been asked and answered in these forums several times. The search button is in the upper right of this page.
If you install Windows using a VM like Parallels or Fusion it is a little easier to share files between Windows and OSx.

Boot Camp Install Issue

I have a 27 inch Imac using OSX Lion 10.7.3 and I would like to install Bootcamp so I can load Windows 7. When I try to use Bootcamp Assistant I get the following message, "The startup disk cannot be partitioned or restored to a single partition." I've gleaned from the forums that I'm going to have to reinitialize the hard drive and reinstall Lion so I can properly use Bootcamp.
Once I reinitialize the drive and reinstall Lion, should I use Bootcamp to create the partition before I restore my Time Machine backup, or should I wait to use Bootcamp until after I've restored my backup? I'm worried that if I wait until after the restore that it would just take me back to "The startup disk cannot be partitioned or restored to a single partition." again. But I'm also worried that if I use Bootcamp before the restore that restoring everything will overwrite the partition, Windows install, etc.
I hope this makes sense. Any help would be appreciated.

The disk was from my other PC system, however it is an OEM upgrade disc. Maybe that is the problem but if that is the case why did it work when I installed it through VMware and it worked fine? The disc can be used as a self full install of windows 7. I have also it on another PC with no issues. Trying to convert to Mac finally but this is causing a hiccup.
The next question then is do I really need to go the boot camp way? I only need it to run quickbooks (need windows version for reasons) and a couple of other programs but thought it may run better as a boot camp install rather than VM plus I couldn't figure out how to reduce the size of the partition that VM installs, it takes too much space from me for no reason (60Gb).
Thanks for any input.

Trying to install win7 over bootcamp with usb flash drive is not accepted

trying to install win7 over bootcamp with usb flash drive, the partition is not accepted under windows although its formatted ntfs, there is shown a faillure which could be read in the logs of win install but i don't find them. Tried at least five times to reinstall / reformat

You'll probably have better responses over in the Boot Camp forum....here's a link for you:
https://discussions.apple.com/community/windows_software/boot_camp

Can I set up my Macbook Pro to boot to Win 7 from an external drive?

Rather than partition my internal drive for having to work with Windows & Office 2010 (specifically Access 2010) can I set up my macbook pro to boot to Win 7 from an external drive?

No, not with Boot Camp. I've never even tried it with a VM (which I use) - I keep all the data on my internal drive. I'm not saying that it couldn't be done with a VM, I've just never tried it.
Clinton

GRUB hangs when booting Oracle VM Server via USB External Drive

I installed Oracle VM Server 2.1 on USB external drive (/dev/sde - 80gb) with First Sector Boot Partion (/dev/sde1) as /dev/sda1 (MBR) is already occupied. After a successful installation, I changed the hard-disk device sequence (not boot order) so that USB drive is found as first C: drive. All I got was the word 'GRUB' displayed (hangs) and nothing else. How do I get Oracle VM Server to boot? Should I reinstall now that the hard drive sequence has been changed?
Thank you.

Not Oracle VM-related, so I would say: "Google is your friend!".
Search for "grub change boot sequence": http://www.google.com/search?q=grub%20change%20boot%20sequence

Boot Camp install of Win 7 TO USB external drive?

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