Boot Camp on External Hard Drive

No, but the drive can be used to hold a Windows disk image for use with an emulator.

(64473)

Boot Camp (the utility from Apple) does not support booting Windows from an external hard drive.

If you are willing to do some work, and search the internet, you can find resources for using an alternative boot loader and making your own Windows installation media to allow you to run Windows from an external drive. Keep in mind that running any OS from an external drive will be much, much slower than running it from an internal drive.

The point melody236 was making is that if you run your Windows as "pure virtual" (only under Paralles, VMWare Fusion, etc.) then you can place the whole virtual machine on an external drive, but then you can't boot into Windows natively.

You might mess up Lion and Lion Recovery

you can run Mac OS from an external

you could free up space and move data from each to an external

or add an SSD or two inside

USB3 or eSATA would be fine, FW800 even. USB2? terrible.

Booting Windows from external hard drive is possible:

In external HD install Mac OS X, and then install windows to same drive via bootcamp.

Delete Mac OS X partition, Resize Windows partition to size you want. VOILA

I tried, it works.

Here's the thing... I'm running my entire machine off of an external Thunderbolt SSD drive. It is SCREAMING fast, but Apple's bootcamp assistant refuses to allow me to install Windows onto my INTERNAL 1TB drive, if I'm booted from my EXTERNAL Thunderbolt SSD. LAME. I don't want to have to install Lion onto the external drive, just so I can boot from it to install Bootcamp/Windows. I mean seriously... that's stupid.

But not with the 2008 MacBook.

And it isn't really Apple's fault, though this Thunderbolt does sound like a perfect use. Microsoft does not. Yes I have PCs that have built in eSATA that will. But it is one of those the exception to the rule that makes the rule.

And Apple is now into soldering SSDs to 2012 logicboard - non-upgradeable?

If anyone has a tool it would be Paragon, install Windows on internal and use "Clone OS to SSD" (works on hdd to hdd, and the actual app is "MigrateOS" )

FWIW I never use Boot Camp Assistant. Just boot from Windows DVD, install. and format the drive for Windows only.

I have tried this and it does not work. When you open up Bootcamp from the external hdd os x install, it gives you an error that you cannot install to an external disk or RAID disk.

Maybe you can elaborate on your procedure to get it to work?

BCA is a one trick pony.

If you intend to use the internal you have two ways:

Put a tiny OS X and use BCA and devote most of the hard drive and leave minimum for OS X

or

disconnect the external and boot from Windows DVD and then delete all the partitions and give the whole drive over to Windows (it will format, you don't need to) and have 100% Windows only - no BCA used (just download the support drivers) in which case knowing how PITA BCA is, you might still need that tiny OS X is.

Clone OS X where you need it with Carbon Copy Cloner to clone Lion and Lion Recovery

So you're saying to install Windows on the internal drive only and use an external drive for OS X?

No. I said if you can't download the drivers now from the external than use the internal and then either leave a small OS X or not.

Bootcamp Windows supports only for external thunderbolt drive.

Therefore, you cannot run Windows in external drive.

I'm having a similar problem.....

Our laptop has failed, so we want to use the Windows hard drive on our Macbook Air.

We plugged in the laptop's internal hard drive using a 'Caddy'. During startup we held 'Options' and booted into the Windows drive.

Nothing...

It kept restarting and trying to Boot into Mac OS.

Is there any way to make this work?

Windows won't boot from an external drive, so no.

It boots into the options to restore/refresh Windows, etc, but no further.