Installing Windows XP Onto External HD

One thing you can do is get an ISO image file, then use disk utility and make an external drive bootable..
The computer will now see the external drive as a bootable cd and allow you to install windows.

VPrime said:

One thing you can do is get an ISO image file, then use disk utility and make an external drive bootable..
The computer will now see the external drive as a bootable cd and allow you to install windows.

Click to expand...

...except that Windows operating systems can't boot from external drives, unless you're willing to sort through the hacks (which involve things like removing you internal drive, etc.)

Depends on your needs/uses for Windows XP.

You could also easily install from an ISO to an external if you are willing to stay with VirtualBox/Parallels/VMWare Fusion.

B

balamw said:

Depends on your needs/uses for Windows XP.

You could also easily install from an ISO to an external if you are willing to stay with VirtualBox/Parallels/VMWare Fusion.

B

Click to expand...

That is the key. No external boot support in Windows. I wonder if they'll ever get that fixed.

Cheers,

panzer06 said:

That is the key. No external boot support in Windows. I wonder if they'll ever get that fixed.

Click to expand...

Doubt it. The Windows licensing and driver model is not amenable to re-"movable" installs. What would an install from a MacBook do on an iMac?

B

balamw said:

Doubt it. The Windows licensing and driver model is not amenable to re-"movable" installs. What would an install from a MacBook do on an iMac?

B

Click to expand...

Depends on the models. When I bought my refurb iMac 24 couple of months ago I just superduper copied my early 2009 to an external drive once I proved it worked using target mode on the mini. I suspect since they both had nvidia gpu it worked so well.

Cheers,

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_1_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile/7D11 Safari/528.16)

I presume you had to reactivate, right?

B

telecomm said:

...except that Windows operating systems can't boot from external drives, unless you're willing to sort through the hacks (which involve things like removing you internal drive, etc.)

Click to expand...

I dont mean install windows on an external drive and have that bootable. I mean mount the ISO onto an external drive.. So the external drive because the install cd.

balamw said:

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_1_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile/7D11 Safari/528.16)

I presume you had to reactivate, right?

B

Click to expand...

Yes, Windows did have to be activated but the phone thing worked fine. Of course OS X just worked. Only had to de-authorized the iTunes store on the old mini and re-authorize on the iMac. Seems iTunes knew it was a different machine.

Cheers,

VPrime said:

I dont mean install windows on an external drive and have that bootable. I mean mount the ISO onto an external drive.. So the external drive because the install cd.

Click to expand...

Follow any of the guides for installing XP on a Netbook via USB Flash Drive, like here: http://komku.blogspot.com/2008/11/install-windows-xp-using-usb-flash-disk.html

B

No, that link won't help you for what you want to do. Like the others said, Windows cannot be booted from an external drive on the Mac. It has to be installed to a partition or a separate internal hard drive.

If you do decide to install to a partition on your MacBook's internal drive though, that link will help you do it without needing an optical drive.

I would like to install Windows xp on mac os x. Following are my quests related to this..

Do I need to have the Activation of Windows XP or just licensed one is enough to install using either of the way using BootCamp or Virtual Box from Sun.

Help for a simpleton!

Hey folks,

Ok, so first let me apologize for the forthcoming post. I have read a lot of the posts on here and it's just not in a language I understand!

I'm trying to install windows 7 onto Mac OSX (snowleopard) via bootcamp. I understand that I have to partition my internal hard drive but I have no idea how to do this correctly. Ideally I would like to be running windows off of an external hard drive. I wondered if there's someone out there kind enough to talk me through it, step by step... as if I'm a 2 year old! Would really appreciate the help.

stevetmp said:

I understand that I have to partition my internal hard drive but I have no idea how to do this correctly. Ideally I would like to be running windows off of an external hard drive.

Click to expand...

This is exactly what the Boot Camp Assistant Apple provides is for. Have you read the Boot Camp instructions from Apple?

For us to be able to help you beyond that, you need to give us more info:

Which Mac? (MacBook, MBP, iMac, mini, Mac Pro?)
How big is your current hard drive?
Which version of Windows do you intend to install?
Have you already obtained Windows? If so how?
What do you want to DO with Windows once you have it installed?
How much disk space do you expect Windows will need?

There are always alternatives, but we need to understand the situation first.

B