Boot Camp install problems

I was under the impression that it was only that Windows couldn't be installed to an external drive, since it clearly installs to an internal drive just fine. But I did some further research into the problem, and I think I can figure out what to do from here. I'm remembering that one of the discs was useful when I installed Windows the first time, somehow, but it's quite possible I'm misremembering. Thank you for the clarification, in any case.

Reactivating this post, because I'm still having problems. I have a Windows 7 iso loaded onto a flash drive. I have two hard drives in my Macbook Pro, and no optical drive (which would be pointless anyway, since I have no discs to install from). I have the Boot Camp drivers and whatever downloaded from the site, since the downloader from within BCA can't do it. I have the appropriate software so that I can mount the iso and get around the fact that BCA wants an optical drive present. There is also a 20GB partition on my main hard drive, created by BCA. The partition is FAT formatted, as is the secondary hard drive. I've tried swapping which drive was where, and with the main hard drive in the secondary slot, BCA had some problem that wasn't going to be fixed in any way besides swapping the drives back.

When I start BCA, and hit continue from the first screen, my two checkbox options are to download the support software (which fails every time, since it's not available from the server) and to Remove Windows 7. If I hit continue with that second thing checked, it explains that hitting restore will remove the Windows partition and restore the disk to a single-partition OS X volume. If I let it do that and reopen BCA after it finishes, the Remove Windows 7 option has become Install Windows 7. If I hit continue with that checked, it gives me the error box about how the installer disc could not be found, even though I have both a bootable (as far as I know) flash drive and the Windows 7 iso mounted.

This is so frustrating; it wasn't supposed to be this difficult to get a second hard drive in my laptop to be dedicated to Windows. I hope someone can help.

All I've done since I started this process is use Google; most of the things I found involved either slightly older versions of Windows or OS X, and certainly nothing guaranteed to work with Mavericks. Many tutorials seemed to rely on the user having access to Windows to do things like put the iso on a flash drive. As far as I can tell, I managed that part without needing Windows, but I can't tell due to the other problems in the process.

Bumping/reopening this yet again, because I still don't have this issue resolved. The facts, as they stand now:

• I have two hard drives available; one is the 500GB that came in the laptop, the other is a 160GB that I've tried using with basically all format options available to me.
• The laptop is a Mid/Late 2007 17" Macbook Pro, running OS X 10.9.3. It was refurbished when I bought it in 2010 (I believe it had had a new battery and hard drive installed, and had no OS on it; I did a clean install of Snow Leopard and imported everything from the hard drive of the Apple laptop that had just died and precipitated the purchase of this one). For whatever reason, Mactracker registers it as both a 17-inch Mid/Late 2007 2.4GHz and as a 15-inch Mid/Late 2007 2.4/2.2GHz.
• I have tried all combos of a Windows ISO on a disc, on a USB flash drive, and a virtually mounted ISO.
• I have tried switching which hard drive is in which bay.
• I have tried going back to my original setup of the 500GB drive with a Boot Camp partition on it, and the optical drive in its usual place. Because of optical drive problems, this still hasn't worked for installing Windows via disc or other method to the Boot Camp partition.
• If I have the Windows ISO on the flash drive, making the flash drive bootable, BCA complains about it and gives me the options of either stopping the entire process or disengaging the bootable flash drive.
• The issue of the downloading support software step never going through is still unresolved. I have downloaded the correct BCA software from the Apple site and put it on the flash drive, but it seems to make no difference.

I have two optical drives at my disposal: the one from this laptop, in this laptop, and one from a former Mac laptop, in an external case of questionable quality. Neither drive is interested in dealing with the disc I burned the Windows ISO onto; both drives take the disc, the one in the laptop cycles a few times and then ejects the disc, and the drive in the external case takes the disc and then spins up and down repeatedly without ever actually mounting the disc, which means I also have to forcibly extract the disc using manual methods, since the disc never appears in the Finder or in Disk Utility.

The furthest I got in this process was some combination of variables that involved BCA getting ready to switch to the Windows install process by restarting the computer, at which point I kept it from restarting immediately and pulled the 500GB hard drive before powering the laptop back on, and it went to the black Windows screen with the blinking cursor and no text, but then it just sat there. I aborted the process after letting it sit there for about fifteen minutes.

I need clear instructions for how to make this work with this hardware and software; ideally the optical drives wouldn't be involved at all, and I would be able to do this with the two hard drives in the laptop, and a bootable flash drive. What I want is to have OS X on the 500GB drive and Windows on the 160GB drive. I've muddled through a dozen different tutorials and some stuff that was well over my skill level. I managed to install Boot Camp and Windows on a partition on the 500GB drive at some point in the past with fewer resources than I have now, so I'm not sure what I did to make it work that time. I made the mistake of removing the partition immediately after using Winclone to copy the data on it, foolishly assuming the process would be easy. I've tried restoring the Winclone copy to the second hard drive, but there's something not bootable about it.

Well, I appreciate you taking the time to respond and link me that post that's slightly longer than mine. I only provide so much information so that other people won't have to ask questions before they can help me.

A little of both, actually. I've tried it and various permutations of it with no success so far.

Okay, but I wasn't discussing the OS in the slightest, I was discussing how to get past the problems I was having with a combo of hard drives and my computer as a whole, and I highly doubt Mavericks was ever part of the problem. Posting my question in the special forums would've gotten me less help than I got here.