Dual Hard Drive Setup With Bootcamp

Hey guys,

I just added a 256gb solid state drive to my Macbook Pro in addition to my main hard drive. The SSD is in the original space for hard drive, and I moved my HDD to the optical bay. Before this change, I used to run both OSX and bootcamp (Windows 7) from the same HDD. Now I am running mac on the SSD (works great), but I am having trouble re-installing windows. I would like for windows to run through bootcamp on the other hard drive (in the optical bay), but when I go to install windows it just sits at the startup screen (the one with the little horizontal blinking white line that looks like its waiting for text input). I have my optical drive plugged in via a usb to SATA connector, and after some googling I found out that the optical drive must be internally installed in order for bootcamp to work. My only thought is to:

1. remove the SSD with osx installed on it
2. return my computer to the original optical drive/HDD setup
3. install osx
4. install windows through bootcamp (leaving only a small partition for osx)
5. return the computer to the way it currently is (optical drive out, SSD in)

My concern with this is that I will not be able to boot to windows from my main osx partition... Anyway, big mess. Thanks in advance for the help.


(Here are my specs)
Macbook Pro Mid-2012
OSX Mavericks (most current version)
Processor 2.9 GHz Intel Core i7
8GB Ram 750gb HDD and 256gb SSD

Thanks, that's pretty much what I ended up doing. I added a second partition of osx (one on each hard drive) and then installed windows on the HDD. Also, I just ordered a second optical drive connector so I could plug directly into the motherboard, so I did nor have to fake everything apart to install windows (this has to be done from a "internal" optical bay.

It does turn out that windows has to be in the main hard drive bay (FYI). Hope this helps anyone with a similar issue.