Installing Windows from an external optical drive?

My superdrive recently died, and I replaced it with an external drive that's been able to read and burn everything I need it to without a problem, including using it to install Snow Leopard.
I tried to use it to install Windows (Vista Home Premium, if that matters) with Boot Camp, but when it comes to starting the actual installation, the computer doesn't seem to see the drive at all. It will start up, with the chime and the grey startup screen, but that's as far as it gets. It will stay on that screen until I restart it and go back into the Mac partition by pressing option at startup.
Is there a way to make it boot to the Windows disc in the external drive? Failing that, is there a way to use Boot Camp successfully with a non-disk source, like an external hard drive or flash drive with the Windows data on it? Any help will be greatly appreciated.

The Hatter:
Thanks for your reply. My purpose is temporary and to document the process of installing Windows in to a Boot Camp partition on a system that does not have an internal Optical drive.
I did this succesfully using bits of information from three documents. I want to go through the process again, this time documenting my steps for the benefit of others and me in the future. You may or maynot know, installing Windows with Boot Camp without an INTERNAL optical drive is difficult and require a hack using Parallels, copying the VM MBR, etc.
I should have documented it the first time but I doubted if it would work.
So, I want a second BC partition, on my second internal drive without touching my working BC patrition on the SSD.
Make more sense?
Thanks,
Kevin

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do I press C or option?
Will any external optical drive work?
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since my previous thread was pretty much ignored - i dare someone again:
To all,
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/Applications/Utilities/Boot Camp Assistant.app: code object is not signed at all
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Also, here are screen captures of the lines that I added. Mine are the top string entries:
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Why won't it let me boot from my external optical drive?

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mikeboyd941 wrote:
How could I put bootcamp/windows 7 on a paritition of the second hard drive?
You'll have to place the optical drive back into the machine.
Then create BootCamp partition on the primary OS X boot drive and install Windows 7 there.
Then return the other hard drive to the optical bay, run BootCamp and create the partition there (??)
Next use WinClone (MacUpdate.com), it runs in OS X, to clone the BootCamped Windows partiton to the other drive or partition on that drive.
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Drives, partitions, formatting w/Mac's + PC's
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I have to agree that Windows8 is a waste of time, especially if you don't have a touch screen and compatible apps.
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Installing Windows from an external optical drive?

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