Can You Now Install Windows 7 64-bit On an External Thunderbolt Hard Drive?

With ThunderBolt you most likely face the same problem as with FireWire.

Until the appropriate drivers arent't loaded at startup Windows is not able to see or use such an external device.

Plus the fact still apllies, that Microsoft doesn't want Windows to be installed onto or run from external harddisks.

So far, Apples BootCamp has foolowed that rule.

Stefan

The consensus seems to be that Windows will not install to an external Thunderbolt drive, despite the particular nuances of Thunderbolt running with Bootcamp drivers (for all intents and purposes, it BEHAVES as if it is an internal drive, at least to the user). It also appears that nobody has tried it, or at least hasn't bothered to post.

Windows 7 is fairly tolerant of being run in a relatively small partition. I've seen it done on install space+50% with a minimum of complications.

Likely, you have one or two applications that are going to require massive amounts of disk space, and you can use your Thunderbolt drive for storage of these applications, or at least the data they generate.

As for me, my Windows 7 partition is 250 Mb (fairly generous), and I have all of my Windows 7 game software on an external thunderbolt drive.

By the way, remember that with the current drivers Thunderbolt devices are not plug-and-play. Thunderbolt devices must be plugged in at startup, and no hot-swapping.

Good Luck!

Quick Correction: That's 250GB, not MB. Since I've been messing with computers singe kilobytes were relevant, I hope my mistake may be forgiven. 🙂

Yep, it works great.

I bought the Thunderbolt adapter for my Seagate GoFlex. Use the Windows 7 install USB stick that Boot Camp makes. Each time Windows installer reboots, you need to hold the option key to reboot back to the new installation. If you miss it and the computer boots back to OS X, no problem, just reboot with option. Once Windows is finished, run Windows Support from your USB stick.

When you try to select Boot Camp in the startup disk control pannel, there is only one 'Boot Camp' even if you have a Windows installation on your internal drive. When you boot into 'Boot Camp' there is a high quality beatiful black and white ASCII boot manager screen that Microsoft made. You'll see 'Windows 7' and 'Windows 7' to choose from. There is a freeware boot manager editor you can use to uniquely name your various Windows boots, or you can use Microsoft's cryptic text based editor. Windows doesn't do Thunderbolt plug and play, so if you're on an internal Windows and plug in the drive, it won't appear or even start up. Reboot and it'll be available in the boot manager.

I plugged the drive in through the Thunderbolt display, and everything worked fine. I was sure I would have activation trouble with all the peripherals in the TB display, but there was none. In the Windows Device Manager, every last thing has a properly working driver. I've never seen a PC with every device working.

It all works because Thunderbolt really is a PCI express slot, just like in a desktop machine. In the GoFlex enclosure, there's an ATA controller just like on an adapter card. Windows hasn't a clue that it's external.

Mlise, may I ask a question. I just want to boot W7 Pro from a bootcamp partition on a just-purchased 27" iMac, 3.4 i7 - and then plug in a Thunderbolt drive (NTFS) to use as external storage. Have you or anyone you know tried this?

On the surface, it seems like it might be simpler than what you did with your boot-from-external setup. I'm just wondering what my chances are, before laying out $$ for the drive. Thank you.

Hi,

Windows 7 should have no trouble with the external NTFS storage, but OS X will only be able to read, not write to it. It'll be way quicker than a USB drive and you could even put a solid state drive out there.

Best regatds

Because Windows 7 usues the Thunderbolt as a PCI slot, it must be connected when the computer boots into Windows 7, then Thunderbolt will be just fine. There are also utilities for reading and writing HFS in Windows (seems to be less error prone) or NTFS in OSX.

Thank you, very encouraging! It's amazing how little testing is done of the boot camp or parallels configuration by the tech sites. Guess there just aren't enough of us, so I'm glad to find individuals that push the boundaries.

Thank you for the comments. Our workflow usually needs to push things from Mac side to Windows side on a regular basis. I did not know about the utilities, we just used to keep a FAT drive around, but don't have that now. If it was you - would you add parallels on top of boot camp, or go with the OSX > NTFS utility?

Well,

Paralles and Boot Camp are two ways to get the same Microsoft compatibility. The difference is that Paralles doesn't give applications direct access to video hardware, so 3D CAD programs and games suffer. If you don't need fast 3D graphics, Paralles is the way to go. If you're short on drive space, like on a Macbook Air, you can keep the Paralles filesystem on an external drive, be it USB, Firewire or Thunderbolt. If you need the 3D graphics, you can use Boot Camp either on the internal drive or on an external Thunderbolt drive.

Amazingly, you can use all three as you need. Windows activation would ordinarily blow up, but because the processor serial number is all the same, I can boot the same licence (legally even) in a Parallels bubble, on a partition on the internal drive, or on an external Thunderbolt drive connected directly to the Macbook Air, or through the Thunderbolt Display.

If you can use a native OS X application like Open Office to make files and push them to an NTFS partition, you won't have to fool with Windows at all and save your company a couple hundred bucks on the Microsoft license.

Cheers

Not sure it's exactly the same. For example, I can apply a firmware update to a device using Boot Camp, and I can't do it using VMware Fusion, and VMware fusion support tells me there are some things that virtualization isn't good for, and that's one of them.

I can boot Windows 7 from a Thunderbolt connected SSD. I achieved this by cloning the bootcamp partition on my internal SSD drive. I've documented my process here:https://discussions.apple.com/thread/6085191