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Re-installing Boot Camp without Optical Drive

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Pngwyn

macrumors regular
Original poster
Oct 20, 2008
173
0
So is it pretty much impossible to install Boot Camp without an internal optical drive in my MBP?

I have a external superdrive as well as another external DVD burner.. but boot camp assistant says I can't use a remote optical drive, does that mean no external drive will work with the install?

Its weird because when I plug my external drive in, boot camp assistant no longer shows the error message. But when I try to install windows, the computer restarts and goes to a black screen with blinking underscore indefinitely.

Is my only choice to take out the optibay, and reinstall everything? Sigh.
 
rezwits

rezwits

macrumors 6502a
Jul 10, 2007
811
414
Las Vegas
Hey!

Check this out, you need to use WinClone 3.5.

It sucks but after you have your Optical back in, install windows just the way you want it, FOR LIFE, I would say.

Boot up till it's all complete, stable, and sitting there waiting for you. Then boot back into Mac and use WinClone 3.5 to back up the Windows Bootcamp partition to an image. If you have a blu-ray you can even burn the image for Backup, it's small enough, maybe even DVD-9.

After that's done you can take out your drive and put the other one in and do whatever you want. Whenever you partition your drive to you can put Windows on it and Restore from the image anytime using the Vista BCD option, and get a someone fresh install without having to go thru the process every time. If you want you can do later backup/restores from other states too...

Have fun, using Windows the only way I know how on Mac...
 
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