Looking for a bootable eSATA ExpressCard

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Level 1

93 points

Looking for a bootable eSATA ExpressCard

June 2007 Santa Rosa Macbook Pro 2.2GHz Core 2 Duo

Premise:
Windows XP/Vista/7 do not allow booting from an external hard drive connected through Firewire or USB, but it does allow booting from an eSATA drive. (Correct?)

I am looking for an ExpressCard with an eSATA connection that will allow me to install and boot the Windows 7 Release Candidate (my internal HD is sticking with XP for now). Some express cards do not support operation system booting at all, so I need help finding an expresscard that will definitely work.

Thanks in advance.

Macbook Pro, Mac OS X (10.5.7), Self-Installed 320GB HD

Posted on Jun 13, 2009 8:54 PM

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Answer 1

kmac1036

Level 4

2,370 points

Sep 4, 2009 6:49 AM in response to KWarp

still looking for one? the cards with the Jmicron chipset are the only ones bootable by OS X.

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Answer 2

Sep 22, 2009 7:25 PM in response to KWarp

KWarp wrote:
Windows XP/Vista/7 do not allow booting from an external hard drive connected through Firewire or USB, but it does allow booting from an eSATA drive. (Correct?)

Sure, on a BIOS machine (i.e. typical PC) with an eSATA port on a controller supported by the machines BIOS (either on the motherboard, or a card with BIOS extensions.)

It's not a sure thing, however, if Bootcamp's EFI BIOS Compatiblity Mode (and Bootcamp Assistant, etc.) would support an ExpressCard eSATA attached drive as an "internal drive". Even if that same card works to boot OSX (under EFI), more is required for Bootcamp.

It'd be interesting to know if it would work, however.

I am looking for an ExpressCard with an eSATA connection that will allow me to install and boot the Windows 7 Release Candidate (my internal HD is sticking with XP for now).

You can have Win XP, Win 7, and OSX on your drive, assuming you have room. Just shrink down your OSX HFS+ partition in Disk Utility, say, 40GB. Then create a FAT32 partition in that space. Mark that partition active with fdisk, reboot and install Win7 and the Bootcamp drivers onto it. You'll need to probably fix up your XP's c:\boot.ini to point to one higher partition to get it booting again. You'll also need to install rEFIt in OSX and select it as your startup disk to choose among the three OS's at startup. Google for tri or multi-boot Mac for many tutorials.

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