Trouble installing bootcamp windows on second SSD

masaguchi46 said:

Hello all,

I recently installed a second SSD drive in my macbook pro (early 2011).
What I did was to take out the optical drive, put the old SSD where the optical drive was, and put the new SSD where the old SSD was.
Everything worked perfectly and I can see the new SSD in disk utilities.
In disk utility, I erased the old SSD and formatted it with Mac Os Extended (journaled). I am using an external optical drive to install windows 7 (it works great!!)

Problem came about when I tried to install windows using bootcamp. When I chose "Erase Disk and create a single partition for windows" on my new SSD drive, the computer restarted. However, after that all i see is the flickering underscore at the top left corner of the screen and nothing else happens (I waited for about 15min but nothing happened).

I read some threads telling me that its a problem because two internal disks are connected to my macbook. Is this really the case?
If so, how can I install windows with just the new SSD in my macbook?
I am aware that bootcamp is not the only program that allows me to install windows on a harddrive, but because of my limited knowledge on macs, I have no choice but to use it.

Thanks for the help!!

Click to expand...

You must keep optical drive to install Windows on Bootcamp. You will install Windows on SSD, after that take out optical drive and plug in your second HDD.

masaguchi46 said:

Ok, so I put the optical drive back in and installed a mac OS from the install disk that came with the computer. I started up bootcamp assistant but now it won't give me the option to use the entire disk as a windows partition (and I can see why). Is there a way to get around this?

Click to expand...

Well, here's something that you can try:

1) Keep the Windows SSD on your main hdd bay at all times, if you are using it in the optibay it won't most likely install/work properly on it (but OSX works with no issues).

2) While the Windows SSD is installed on your mainbay and the OSX SSD is installed on your optibay, start the bootcamp assistant and delete/create the new Windows partition in the Windows SSD, but don't restart your computer, just shut it down.

3) Install your optical drive back in it's optibay slot, power up your machine again and boot your computer by holding alt-button down. If the Windows installation disc is already inside that drive, you should be able to boot the Windows installation disc from here.

4) If the system now installs correctly and you can boot into Windows, you can now just shut down your machine, remove the optical drive and reinstall the OSX SSD in the optibay slot.

5) When you start up your machine next time, you should be able to select the operating system by holding the alt-button during the boot (and then selecting the startup drive in either osx settings or windows bootcamp manager.

Hope this helps. I personally didn't need this method since my optibay came with an external usb enclosure for my original superdrive and it worked just fine.