Is it possible to install Windows 7/8 from a partition on a separate drive?

Question

Hi everyone,
Early 2008 Mac Pro with 10.8.2.
I have two sata drives mounted in my tower--the OS drive and a media drive.
I'm wondering if it's possible to partition 10 or so GB off of that secondary media drive (OS Extended Journaled, GUID), load the win 7 (or 8) ISO and install Windows through bootcamp via that new partition.
Alternately, I have an external USB drive (sata), and could possibly try that same method of formatting off 10 gigs and loading the ISO in a similar manner if bootcamp only checks between DVD media and USB for where it wants to read the installer file.
This method would circumvent the need for a blank DVD or a USB flash drive--both of which I don't currently have.
Does anybody have any experience with this?

Answer 1

I am trying to install Windows Server 2008 R2 Ent edition onto system that has an ASUS M3A78 Pro motherboard with 8GB of memory & an AMD Phenom II x3 2.6GHz Socket AM3 Processor
(X3 710).
I realize that this system doesn't support UEFI but I have an Adaptec 3805 RAID controller in this system that does support the advanced format hard drives, so I would think I should
be OK there.
Attached to the RAID controller are 3 - 1.5TB SATA Hard Drives in a RAID 5 yeilding 2.72TB's of usable space.
I followed the following process to convert the array to GPT.
I booted to the Server 2008 R2 Ent installation DVD.
I select next at the language \ time & currency format \ Keyboard selection screen.
Then I select the 'repair your computer' option at the following screen.
I do not select the 'repair' (default) option, but instead select the radio button above it (I forget what that's labeled) working from memory here - which gives me the option to
launch a command prompt.
I launch diskaprt from that command prompt.
First I selected the disk
list disk (this displays the installed disks)
select disk 0
The I converted the disk to gpt
convert gpt
Then I created 200 MB EFI partition:
create partition
efi size=200
Then I created MSR
partition:
create partition
msr size=128
Then I created primary
partition:
create partition
primary
...and it took remaining
available space to itself.
I assigned drive
letter C to this new first "primary" partition
Assign letter=c
I confirmed the order is:
I confirmed the partition order is:
ESP > MSR > DATA Partition
After all of that I restart into the Windows installation and attempt to install by selecting the newly created primary partition and am presented with an error that states:
“Windows cannot be installed to Disk 0 Partition 3. (Show details)”
and the details show:
"Windows cannot be installed to this disk. The selected disk is of the gpt partition style."
Any help anyone could provide would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks