Installing Windows on MBA? external

Put it on a flash drive and boot from USB.
Or the unethical way would be to go to Best Buy and buy a Superdrive, go about your business, and then return it the next day.

Purely Elf said:

I have 22GB free, but that shouldn't even matter because I want to install Windows on my external drive, not my startup.

Click to expand...

Is installing windows on an external hard drive now supported through boot camp?!

qpiqp said:

Is installing windows on an external hard drive now supported through boot camp?!

Click to expand...

OP got me excited. I just checked, and still no unfortunately.

You know I had this issue this weekend when I got my MBA and I broke down and went to the Apple store and got a USB super(pricey) drive.

So sat down to start the install and fired up the bootcamp assistant and behold! Bootcamp on MBA gives you an option of making a bootable Windows USB Flash Drive if you have the ISO of the Windows installation disc!!!!

I had already opened the Superdrive etc so I just decided to keep it for other things.

Other option, there is a utility provided by Microsoft that will make a bootable USB drive from a ISO.

http://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msstore/html/pbPage.Help_Win7_usbdvd_dwnTool

I bet this is what the bootcamp assistant does as well. And I would choose the bootcamp route as the Microsoft Utility needs the same bit windows(If you are installing 64 bit windows, then the utility should be used from a 64 bit windows machine to create the USB)

Or you can do it manually yourself by following the procedure below but beware, formatting the USB Flash drive can take an hour or more.

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/usb-installation-disk-windows-7-extra-software/

Don't forget that you do not need an optical drive at all if you have another computer (need not be Mac) that has one.

Are you saying you have a Win7 iso file already that's not on disk? If that's true, you don't even need an optical drive at all, just the Product Key aka Serial Number from the disk packaging.
But as other posters have noted, it's only going to install onto the mac drive which may get tight if only 22gig is free.

wolfpuppies3 said:

Don't forget that you do not need an optical drive at all if you have another computer (need not be Mac) that has one.

Click to expand...

Unfortunately, Bootcamp does not support Remote Disc installation.

----------

I've done successful installations of Win7 on two machines now (rMBP and Mini) so I can answer questions about doing this via flash drive if anyone has any. It's not too tricky but there are a few tips. One is to be sure to use a 8gb or larger drive to fit both the ISO and the drivers downloaded from Apple.

edit:
I re-read the topic and other posts, and realized I was talking about a totally different subject, my bad