How to run Boot Camp on External Hard Drive?

Your advice is ...well....not good. First off, no games will play in a virtual machine unless it's solitaire. Second, you can boot Windows from a Thunderbolt drive or even some USB 3.0 drives assuming they're the correct chipset. The catch with most USB 3.0 drives is that they tax the CPU when running on OS from them. You'll want a high quality SSD either way, but do research before proceeding. I have installed Windows on intel macs natively, with 0 bootcamp assistance whatsoever. You just need the bootcamp driver iso from Apple and you're set. Please stop posting incorrect information, sir.

In case you are still trying to do this, yes it's very possible, I've done it myself.

Get a Seagate Backup Plus external thunderbolt sled adapter ($95 or so on Amazon).

Get a good SSD from Samsung or Sandisk ($95-105 for a 256GB on Amazon).

Get a thunderbolt cable ($30 give or take).

Windows will boot from thunderbolt and run incredibly fast, and yes you can run dx11 games at full resolution with settings maxed out. I've had 0 issues on my 2013 27" iMac i5 with the Gtx 775m 2gb GPU 🙂

How are you a level anything with poopy advice and information like this?

CrankTurner wrote:

Your advice is ...well....not good. First off, no games will play in a virtual machine unless it's solitaire.

Sure they will, just not well in many cases.

CrankTurner wrote:

Second, you can boot Windows from a Thunderbolt drive or even some USB 3.0 drives assuming they're the correct chipset.

How do you get Boot Camp to create the partition on an external drive?

Just not very well, indeed! 😟

Honestly I never use Bootcamp, I have always just used the Bootcamp driver package for whichever particular Mac I'm installing Windows on, after the Windows install completes.

I just boot from a Windows 7 image that I installed on an 8GB USB flash drive (hold down the option key after you power on the mac), and install it on a partition I already created on the SSD from the disk utility in Mac OS. You can create it in exFAT format or just FAT, and then tell the Windows installer to reformat in NTFS when you're doing the install. After Windows is installed, it will come up as bootable option in the boot menu when you hold down the option key while powering up.

The question you attempted to answer is "How to run Boot Camp on an External Hard Drive"

The answer is that you can't.

I'm fairly certain you can though, assuming you know what you're doing. And besides, that question itself is pointless since Boot camp can be completely bypassed with the method I used. Waste of time...

OK. I am more interested in the OP's question, but you can go on as you wish about your method,

I'm out of here.

Hm, more interested in wasting time with Bootcamp's limitations rather than just installing Windows directly? Ok enjoy 🙂 You're welcome!

Actually, Csound1, was more interested in answering the original poster's question rather than feeling the need to try to "grandstand". If you actually read the whole thread you replied to, you would see that "your solution" was already discussed as a possible answer, except it was offered in a reasonable time frame for the original poster who asked the question, not 9 months later.

I understand that, but the main reason I even posted at all was in response to your totally inaccurate/incorrect responses to his questions, 9 months old or not. Any 3D game will require a capable graphics card, and virtual machines do not supply this in any form. So 1 out of 1,000,000 games would work, barely. And you can't just say "generally speaking, no it won't work" when in fact it does, and it did 9 months ago when you responded. I was booting into Windows from USB drives since the very first intel macs in 06, just to see how they handled intense games and applications in Windows. No one is grandstanding here, but to sit there and argue about the thread topic and answering only the question at hand, is a poor excuse when you're presented with better solutions; which Myshiko and I did... Earlier in the thread I did see Mishiko's replies, but he used the Seagate Goflex external adapter, and I wanted to update it since the Seagate Backup Plus adapter is the definite way to go (now) for external booting into Win/Mac OS.

Crank, your meyhod is old and unexcitimg, and this thread does not exist so you can show off how wonderful you are.

Showing up 9 months ago might have helped, now you are just late, and off topic.

Just to educate you guys in case you didn't know, these support forms can be accessed by anyone with a search engine and a question similar to the OP's, at any point in time. CrankTurner is simply providing an alternative method for people to achieve a goal similar to the one stated by the OP. Because he was the only person to provide a viable, working alternative solution to the OP's (and any other person's) question, he should be thanked, not attacked for providing a different solution to your "You can't" approach. So thank you CrankTurner.

Alright Crankturner...

I've tried your method. I've got an iMac with a external thunderbolt SSD attached to it. I formatted the SSD with 2 GUID partitions, one as Journaled and one as FAT. I booted to my windows installation disc, selected the FAT partition, it wanted to format it so I did, it's now marked as "primary," but it's unable to install to the selected location Error 0x80300024 (location) which makes sense since Windows hates thunderbolt. So what exactly didn't I do that you did to make this work?

Thank you very much Sushiboy 🙂 That's the way I look at it. I always stumble upon forum threads and usually go to the end to find what solutions people did or didn't have. When I see flame wars I usually move onto the next one, so dumb. But thanks 🙂