How to run Boot Camp on External Hard Drive?

One could try to get into a discussion with OWC about how 'BootCamp not supported' has to be interpreted, but even if you win the argument, it would be a Phyrric victory. Had I known before, I would have gotten another DeLock box. Half the price, on SSD also 10% faster then the OWC, and supports both OSX and Windows without having to disconnect one drive.

My personal opinion: with OWC product it is best to read all the specs, follow all links and read the manuals, before you buy. Or you may be in for an unpleasant surprise.

Would I by OWC gear again? Probably not...

Do you have an option to return the OWC EDP?

I thought about returning it. But, I have to admit... it is a nice, solid box. I like its build. I once ordered an 2-bay USB RAID box for my NAS, from the cheaper segment of the market, but that one was too flimsy, too noisy and already DOA. That one I returned.

It is not the product itself that ticked me off, but that I had to spend two days trying to figure out how to make it work, due to the lack of information. It should have been stated more clearly what the limitations are. But, I'll use the OWC as I have it now, with the switch. Adds 30 seconds to the process of booting into the other OS, which is acceptable.

Thank you for the guided steps. My Retina iMac can now boot Win 8.1 from an external SSD via USB 3. The only change was #8 needed to be CREATE PARTITION PRIMARY.

Cool guide. I'll try it out

Followed steps change 8 to CREATE PARTITION PRIMARY booting to fish has been on fish for some time any idea how long this fish should be on screen how long is too long?

Thanks

hey ! i've got a 500 SSHD external Drive where i want to install Win7 (plugged in USB3, pretty fast) but i tried several solutions and nothing… ;(

There are the different errors i get (≠ senarios) when i boot on SSHD after win7 was supposingly installed on it :

• Blue screen with generic errors, win7 don't want to launch

• Black screen which says that there isn't any system 😮 (on external i precise)

So i tried the last chance, make a installation USB Stick with BootCamp Assistant and reboot on it but win7 (here everything works great…) but when i choose the SSHD, "the software" tell me that windows can't be installed on USB or IEEE… volume…

So my question is : do you achieved a win7 installation on an External HardDrive and if YES, HHOOWW ?!

Thanks !

Hi Antoine.

I also started out with Win7, but did not get it to work.

So I switched to Win8 and it worked first time

Followed all steps. When I boot up my Mac, with the drive plugged in, the drive does NOT appear in the menu as an option. It is just the networks and Macintosh HD.

Hi I have not actually tried (but I will soon)

just wondering would it matter if I format the drive in the new ExFAT format instead of NTFS? Or should I just stick with NTFS

NTFS is required, Windows won't run on ExFat

Last week I had a catastrophic failure of my internal Bootcamp partition in a 2014 MacMini (Genius referred me to Microsoft and latter claimed incompetence with Bootcamp-related matters). Therefore I bought a LaCie Thunderbolt external 500 GB SSD drive, went through all of the literature applicable to running bootcamp from an external drive, and tried out most of them. I did not try 3rd party utilities such as Winclone, Paragon, Aramis, etc, because these gimmicks had ruined Bootcamp partitions for me in the past. I can testify after many trials, that installing Bootcamp on an external drive DOES NOT WORK, the assistant will always tell you that the drive is not "journaled", although it was freshly formatted as journaled (with GUID) with or without Mac OS X (Yosemite latest), and Bootcamp assistant run from internal or external Mac OS X installation. The only way that worked for me was running bootcamp from the internal assistant on the internal drive, create the smallest (20GB) bootcamp partition possible, and then, within the Windows Installation environment, direct installation of Windows 7 (Ultimate) to the external drive, which needs to be NTFS-MBR formatted. This did work, and then I had to spend three days to update Windows and reinstall all applications and then restore my personal files.I did not dare to restore from a system image, because I was prompted that this would erase my entire Bootcamp partition. The drawback here is that 20GB are wasted, but with a 1TB internal harddrive this is a nonissue. Also, at times, when I boot up from Windows/Bootcamp, the Apple Thunderbolt display stays black, this may be a Thunderbolt issue where somebody can help me out. At this point, when this happens, I need to reboot under Mac OS X, then shut down and reboot Windows/Bootcamp. What is nice about my current setup, it is fast, perhaps faster than the original internal installation, and my external drive (its name is LILY) shows up as C:(LILY) rather than C:(Bootcamp) in the Windows explorer. This may now enable me to restore LILY within Windows from a system image backup (without messing up Bootcamp), but I did not try this out for fear of wasting another 3 days. Perhaps somebody in the Community can provide feedback on this. As discussed, this setup works with a Thunderbolt SSD drive ($$$). I do not know whether this would work with a standard Thunderbolt drive or with a FireWire drive (as long as your Mac still has a FireWire port). Though I did not try, too, its my strong hunch that USB will not support the external Windows installation. Cheers, Steve

Also, at times, when I boot up from Windows/Bootcamp, the Apple Thunderbolt display stays black, this may be a Thunderbolt issue where somebody can help me out. At this point, when this happens, I need to reboot under Mac OS X, then shut down and reboot Windows/Bootcamp.

This is a known issue on how Windows loads drivers and device discovery on TB devices. W10 may fix this issue.

What is nice about my current setup, it is fast, perhaps faster than the original internal installation, and my external drive (its name is LILY) shows up as C:(LILY) rather than C:(Bootcamp) in the Windows explorer. This may now enable me to restore LILY within Windows from a system image backup (without messing up Bootcamp), but I did not try this out for fear of wasting another 3 days. Perhaps somebody in the Community can provide feedback on this.

LILY can also be D:. It makes very little difference. D: is actually a safer setup. If you lose the internal 20GB C: you can just re-install Windows and plug D: and there is no need to backup C: (20GB on the 1TB disk). C: being pure OS is actually a much simpler recovery environment. D: can also move between different machines as long as applications are not married to MAC addresses and specific hardware.

TB is the only method to run this environment. USB/FW do not support it.

Loner T,

Thanks for your insightful responses. I did not know that I had a choice to assign a letter to the drive under Windows. Please advise how. In fact, the Windows installation, as far as I know, always resides on C: and D: is reserved for an additional internal drive that does not host Windows. Anyway, within Windows, on my current configuration, LILY (the external TB drive) shows up as the system disk C:, and all (external) other disks show up with letter E: and higher. Bootcamp and Mac OS X partition do not show up under Windows, and I learned previously that this is a property of the hybrid drives that have been used in the 2014 and newer MacMinis. Under Mac OS X, Macintosh HD ("Gise" on my machine) and Bootcamp show up as internal drives, and Bootcamp displays no content. LILY (the external TB drive hosting Windows), shows up as external drive (yellow drive icon), and files can be copied off it into the Mac environment. That's kind of it, thank you for your help, it would be great to know how to assign the letters, but FTB I'll leave it at this, because after over a week my system is working again, I do most of my work in Windows because of my customer base, but a functioning Bootcamp Windows partition on a Mac is just so much better than a regular Dell or HP.

Cheers, Steve

I took D: as an example. On Macs, D: gets mapped to the read-only OS X JHFS+ partition. Yosemite does not support D: if the drive is a CoreStorage volume. E: is the first available drive letter on the Windows side in such a case. In certain cases, it is possible to revert the Yosemite CS volume to a JHFS+ volume.

You do not want to change the drive letter for the OS X disk, if visible. It causes untold grief and pain. As you plug and remove disks when booted in Windows with appropriate Eject commands as necessary, let Windows manage the drive letters. The only change I have made is make Z: as my Optical drive. D (or E) through Y are dynamically allocated/deallocated as necessary.

The reason for recommending C: as Windows-OS-Only disk is to avoid any potential data loss, by keeping everything else on a external disk which provides a clean backup and a clean restore. D:/E: as an external drive can also move between multiple Windows systems, without handcuffing you a specific machine.