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havocist

macrumors newbie
Original poster
May 10, 2011
4
0
I've got a MacBook Pro with an aftermarket SSD. The original HDD is in the optical bay. The SuperDrive is in an external enclosure, which I can't boot from. I don't want to install Windows 7 to the SSD as space is limited and I won't use it that much.

Every online tutorial about rEFIt and dd'ing the Win7 DVD onto a USB leaves me with a blank black screen at boot (after choosing boot from DVD from any menu). Yes, it's a legit copy of Win7. Some further googling seems to imply that Win7 needs EFI 2.0 and macs don't have that.(?)

If I pull the SSD out, move the drives around, put the hdd back in it's place and the dvd back in it's place then I won't have an install of OS X anywhere if that's needed, and honestly, I'm not sure it's worth taking everything apart again.

So, anyone done this? Got any hints about how to get it to boot from a USB or the OptiBay DVD drive?
 

riptideMBP

macrumors 6502
May 29, 2011
260
0
I actually just installed windows via bootcamp last night for my SSD/HDD setup. I tried many partitioning schemes and refit options, along with the parallels method to try and use my external superdrive, but none of them worked so I broke down and re-installed my superdrive. Before you put your superdrive back in, run bootcamp utility from your SSD and select your mechanical hard drive as the disk you want to set it up on (it will be erased). Then once it has partitioned the drive, quit the utility instead of proceeding with installation. Next, put the superdrive in (shifting the HDD to the hard drive bay). Boot up holding the option key, and insert the windows 7 disk. From here the installation should be completely normal. once you're done and you've installed the windows drivers from the osx install dvd, you can revert back to the SSD/HDD setup.

Note: the disk will only be erased if there are multiple partitions
 
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havocist

macrumors newbie
Original poster
May 10, 2011
4
0
Thanks for the tips. I'm glad I'm not the only one having problems doing this.

I might have to develop a very powerful need for Windows 7 before taking the whole thing apart and putting it back together again. I'm not sure that need will ever arise.
 
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