Able to resize partion with bootcamp without issues? Plus can I boot from External?

[Dorfdad]

Before you all say it im asking for a cardinal sin here I know!

I currently have OSX and Vista 32 on my iMac and to be honest ive found myself booting into VISTA 95% of the time now. but I only had a 40 gig Partition setup.

I have two questions. Is there a way to reduce the size of my OSX partiton without losing data and give that to VISTA?

Also is there a way to boot my OSX off an external drive all the time?!? I understand VISTA cant be booted off the external but can OSX? I have a 500 gb USB2 drive sitting here empty could that run OSX with no speed issues?

I would like to use my OSX partiton for important things and my Vista for gaming etc...

thanks. Also if yes please explain to me how this would be done, apps needed etc.

 

[Tallest Skil]

Clone Vista partition to external hard drive.
Delete Boot Camp partition.
Resize Boot Camp partition.
Restore from cloned image.

That's all you can do.

 

[mathcolo]

Before you all say it im asking for a cardinal sin here I know!

I currently have OSX and Vista 32 on my iMac and to be honest ive found myself booting into VISTA 95% of the time now. but I only had a 40 gig Partition setup.

I have two questions. Is there a way to reduce the size of my OSX partiton without losing data and give that to VISTA?

Also is there a way to boot my OSX off an external drive all the time?!? I understand VISTA cant be booted off the external but can OSX? I have a 500 gb USB2 drive sitting here empty could that run OSX with no speed issues?

I would like to use my OSX partiton for important things and my Vista for gaming etc...

thanks. Also if yes please explain to me how this would be done, apps needed etc.

Despite the nature of the rest of the question, yes, it is possible to boot OSX off of an external HD.

 

[Dorfdad]

Despite the nature of the rest of the question, yes, it is possible to boot OSX off of an external HD.

thanks both of you is there anything special needed to setup OSX off external drive? and do I lose any functionality? Speed issues etc?

 

[sickmacdoc]

thanks both of you is there anything special needed to setup OSX off external drive? and do I lose any functionality? Speed issues etc?

Nothing special needed to setup OSX on an external drive- just select the external when asked for the installation location in the install process- and no functionality will be lost when booted from it.

Speed could certainly be an issue for you though since you are intending to boot it from a USB 2.0 drive and the internal is running off a SATA bus- quite a discrepancy in speed potential. Your best bet would be to do the OSX installation on the external as you planned to do, then boot up from it and test save times for some large files to it first- then reboot with the internal drive and repeat the tests, saving this time to the internal. I think you will find some substantial speed/time differences. Also note the time required to boot each of them. Both of those things should begin to tell you if the speed degradation is something that you can live with.

Also, while I know you already have a USB drive note that using a FireWire 800 drive would reduce the discrepancy considerably, but still not eliminate it.