How to run Boot Camp on External Hard Drive?

There is some literature on the WinClone website about how to clone a functional internal Bootcamp partition on an external drive and render it bootable, but this works only with Windows 8.1 and above, and there are so many strings attached that I'd be hesitant to do it.

I actually succeeded with WinClone to create an image of Lily on an HFS formatted external drive, and within Winclone, this image can be restored to Lily. I have not tried, however, because earlier versions of Winclone royally corrupted previous Bootcamp partitions of mine. I'll wait for 911 with this.

cheers

Can you restore the Winclone image and test it for boot ability?

This would set me back another $370 for a second TB flash drive. For obvious reasons I am very hesitant to restore the WinClone image onto the current home of C:LILY. So this experiment will have to wait for a time when I am more flush.

Cheers, Steve

I finally got Win 8.1 (note this was an "upgrade" key) installed on my 2015 RMBP 13" and just wanted to share my experience. I bought 8.1 from my university and used the provided executable to download the ISO. I more or less followed GGooeytoe's guide with a few minor modifications; I had to make these modifications as I couldn't get my drive recognized in the RMBP without the slight modifications. I am using a brand new SSD in a USB 3.0 enclosure and used the windows disk manager on another desktop to get the drive ready.

Note that I could not use Pierre80's method because when I went into my ISO I saw install.ESD instead of install.wim. It was too much hassle to convert it. This method works without the wim file and is quite simple relative to the MANY failed approaches that I attempted.

Here are the steps:

0) On the 2015 RMBP, open up Bootcamp in OSX and choose the option to download the drivers. Copy the drivers onto a flash drive.

1) Set up the SSD in Windows disk manager. Plug in the drive, right click on the SSD, click "Convert to GPT Disk." If this option is not active, then you may have an existing partition on the SSD. To get this option, erase the existing partitions on your SSD. Afterwards, create a new Fat32 partition of size 100MB, which will be used for the EFI partition, followed by an NTFS partition with the remainder of the space (I called mine Windows).

2) Download WinToUSB (free) and tell it where the Win 8.1 ISO file is. When asked, select the Fat32 partition as the EFI system partition and the "Windows" partition as the boot partition. Let WinToUSB do its magic and install the ISO.

3) Try booting the external SSD on the mac. Plug the SSD in, turn on the laptop, and hold alt while the machine is turning on. You should be able to boot into the Windows installation now and finish the install.

4) After the base install, plug in the flash drive with bootcamp drivers and set them up.

5) Sit back and enjoy your new system.

6) Optional. My RMBP's screen was dimmer in 8.1 as opposed to OSX. I went into power management and turned dynamic brightness (or something to this effect) off. Instantly my screen was brighter!

Thanks everyone.

After upgrading my Windows 7 Pro in Boot Camp to 10 and making the Windows 10 Pro DVD using the Media Creation Tool downloaded from MS, the Windows 10 DVD has UEFI/EFI compatibility. Heads up!

Windows Disc will boot and install.

I installed Windows 10 Pro exclusively on my internal HD and Yosemite 10.10.5 on my external LaCie Rugged Thunderbolt HD.

Cheers!!

jndupuis1 wrote:

I installed Windows 10 Pro exclusively on my internal HD and Yosemite 10.10.5 on my external LaCie Rugged Thunderbolt HD.

The question is related to BC/Windows on an external disk not OS X. OS X can be run from an external disk, which is by design (please see - How to install OS X on an external drive connected to your Mac - Apple Support ). 😉

Thunderbolt uses PCI semantics to access external disks. To install Windows on an external disk, a TB drive can be used.

Hi Loner

This is Steve again, it has been a while. As you may recall, we were discussing Windows 7 on an external drive, and eventually I was able to do so, using La Cie SSD 500 Gig Thunderbolt that carries the Windows System and all Window environment data as C:(LILY), but relies on a "dummy" 20 GB Bootcamp partition in the main internal 1TB Fusion drive (Mac Mini). It worked and still works like a charm. At the time were were continuing the discussion about how to back up, or better "clone" LILY. I did stop there, because this required the purchase of another LaCie SSD drive. Now I have done so, but I have run into a dead end: Adter I used Winclone to clone LILY onto the new drive, Windows 7 did not boot from the new drive, and I cannot even boot from Windows 7 install disk, because there are no drivers (mouse and keyboard are dead). The original set up continues to work. I believe that the problem is the following: In my working set up, the dummy Bootcamp partition is GUID and FAT-formatted, while LILY is MBR and NTFS formatted. Winclone will refuse to restore to the destination disk (the new LaCie drive) as long as it is MBR, but it needs to be MBR to work. Do you have suggestions? One idea would be to clone LILY to the new drive in the Windows environment using Acronis or something similar. However, because Thunderbolt dose not work under Windows 7, the target disk would need to be connected by USB. The whole thing with Windows 7 is a real *****, because I understand that Windows 10 has addressed these issues, and I am going to upgrade eventually. But I do need to have the Windows 7 functionality because most of my customers are not expecting to upgrade to Windows 10 for a long time. Please advise you or refer to other expert.

Thanks, Steve

Connect your new LaCie to your Mac via Thunderbolt and Reboot into Windows. Do you see the external disk? If yes, let us look at the partitions and the MBR to see what is going on.

LOner,

If I connect the second drive through Thunderbolt, Windows will not boot. It will boot only if the new drive is either disconnected or connected through USB3 port. I can see the drive though if I boot up under Mac OSX.

Stefan

Let us look at it from the OSX side.

YYes, I am in OS X now

Post the output of diskutil list and then we can dig deeper.

Do you want to post a new discussion, which will make it a bit cleaner?

OK, Go ahead pls

Anyway, the output is:

acMiniSH:~ pentelho$ diskutil list

/dev/disk0 (internal, physical):

#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER

0: GUID_partition_scheme *121.3 GB disk0

1: EFI EFI 209.7 MB disk0s1

2: Apple_CoreStorage Macintosh HD 121.0 GB disk0s2

3: Apple_Boot Boot OS X 134.2 MB disk0s3

/dev/disk1 (internal, physical):

#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER

0: GUID_partition_scheme *1.0 TB disk1

1: EFI EFI 209.7 MB disk1s1

2: Apple_CoreStorage Macintosh HD 979.3 GB disk1s2

3: Apple_Boot Recovery HD 650.1 MB disk1s3

4: Microsoft Basic Data BOOTCAMP 20.0 GB disk1s4

/dev/disk2 (internal, virtual):

#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER

0: Apple_HFS Gise +1.1 TB disk2

Logical Volume on disk0s2, disk1s2

6614C729-98D2-4522-BF2C-7B727225F0CE

Unencrypted Fusion Drive

/dev/disk3 (external, physical):

#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER

0: FDisk_partition_scheme *512.1 GB disk3

1: Windows_NTFS LILY 512.1 GB disk3s1

/dev/disk4 (external, physical):

#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER

0: FDisk_partition_scheme *512.1 GB disk4

1: DOS_FAT_32 LILY2 512.1 GB disk4s1