Q: How to run Boot Camp on External Hard Drive?

AS far a I know, external Windows per Bootcamp requires a thunderbolt SSD drive and a thunderbolt enabled Mac which I am not sure applies to iMac 2012. I have described in an earlier post how this works with Windows 7 on a 2015 MacMini (the core Bootcamp though ~40 MB) need to reside on an internal partition). I have heard that with Win 10 everything can be on the external drive but I have not tried it out.

I am a total noob here.  I have a mac mini less than a year old.  Running 10.11.4  It has a fusion internal drive.  I can not get bootcamp to find either the internal drive, or either of my thunderbolt external drives?  External drives are WD: my passports.  Shouldn't I be able to create a Windows bootable version on one of these drives through base camp?

Thank you,

John

Yes it is possible to install Windows 10 on a external USB hard drive. Follow the technical recipe below: "Installing Windows 10 on an external USB drive on a Macbook By Jeremiah Byerley"

http://www.jeremiahbyerley.com/installing-windows-10-on-an-external-usb-drive-on -a-macbook/

It works like a dream.

Look at Run Windows 10 from an external SSD disk? Yes, it works! YES!

I got Windows 10 Education running on my 13" 2015 MacBook Air, installed on a 1TB Seagate HDD. The method given by Pierre80 didn't work for me though. I would get a bunch of errors in the bcdboot command. (typing BCDBOOT G:\WINDOWS /S /V G: lets you see details of the process)

In the end what worked for me was this great YouTube video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2aZeGVETPs

Apparently for this method you don't even need Microsoft AIK; only the ImageX tool.

And as for the problem of transferring files between OS X and Windows, once Windows was up and running I simply shrunk the Windows partition (from the Manage utility in Windows) and formatted the resulting space with FAT. I even used this partition to transfer the Boot Camp drivers!

Good luck!