Boot camp on an external hard drive

look here: http://forum.onmac.net/showthread.php?t=1015

the onmac forum is a good place to have a look when it comes to bootcamp.

as for your HD speed question, I don't really now. Maybe you'll have to ask this question in the forum to somebody who actually tried it.

Unfortunately, current bootcamp release does not support external disk. You can not install XP to external disk. I also tried installing linux to my external disk, thinking that this will be different than installing windows, but no hope, it doesn't work.

Is it possible to use bootcamp and run windows on an
external hardrive rather than the built in one with
out sacrificing speed. Im looking to get a hard
drive for all my windows stuff and I was hoping to be
able to run windows straight from it but I understand
that alot of them dont run fast enough to support
running an operating system. Any suggestions as to a
hard drive to look at getting. I'd be looking at
something about 100 gigs. The most important thing
would be running Vista or xp. Any suggestions?
Thanks - Peter

I belive there might be a way, I just haven't gotten around to trying this out.

1) use disk utility to partition the external drive to ntfs (i think)

2) attach this disk to a pc and install the OS

3) install refit onto your mac

4) attach the drive via fw800, or even better yet esata, to you mac.

5) Start up your mac

6) choose the win xp option from the boot menu

7) install bootcamp drivers

this seems, in theory, that it should work. but this would probably be an easier solution:

1) use disk utility to partition the external drive to ntfs (i think)

2) install XP onto your internal drive via boot camp.

3) create a disk image of XP

4) drop the files from the image onto your external drive

5) install refit onto your mac

6) attach the drive via fw800, or even better yet esata, to you mac.

7) Start up your mac

8) choose the win xp option from the boot menu for the external drive

9) once you have determined that this works, you can delete the xp partition from your internal drive and you will have all the space of your external drive for XP

I would def think about getting an esata drive and the express card for this solution though.

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other%20World%20Computing/MEAQ7320GB16/

http://refit.sourceforge.net/