Boot Camp on FW drive. (Bootcamp+windows already installed)

[Manic Harmonic]

I've heard this is possible but I'm having trouble...

I had an HD with OSX lion on it (couldn't get bootcamp do do anything on my usual SL system), so i put it in my MBP temporarily. partitioned and installed bootcamp on that drive, installed windows, drivers, etc. booted it up and it all worked fine. I then took that HD out, put it in a USB enclosure and attemped to start windows from it. When I started it up, I did not see the windows partition.

No dice. I figured I would have some issues but I'm kind of stumped. I installed refit on the lion HD, and it showed my windows drive, but told me to insert a bootable disc on startup. I'm going to try Refit on SL next, but I doubt it will work.

Any ideas? should I install windows on my internal SL drive and then winclone it over? I didn't know how to do that because everytime I try to get the SL drivers it gives me an error about "unable to locate drivers" or something like that... Maybe winclone it to a firefire drive?

any help would be appreciated, I'm tired of VM's and I don't want to use up a lot of space on my internal. Not to mention i can't even get the drivers to work for SL.

Thanks!

 

[MagicBoy]

Windows is not as resilient as OS X and other *nix systems in that it can't just start up from any bootable bus connection such as USB/FW/SATA/SCSI etc.

Simply put Windows has to be run from the storage bus it was installed on. Even simple changes like changing the SATA mode or updating firmware can send Windows into a tailspin and have it refusing to boot or blue screening with a STOP 7B error.

 

[Sincci]

I solved similar issue by getting rid of my optical drive and replacing it with MCE optibay so that I can have an SSD and a HD on a same machine.

The only issue was that the Windows 7 refused to install itself while the SSD was connected to the optibay (I'm using the whole SSD just for Windows since that's the operating system I mostly work on). After switching the places with the HD, I managed to install Windows 7 on the SSD and OSX on the HD (plus I re-partitioned my HD so that most of the harddrive is formated as NTFS and rest is used for OSX Lion).

The optibay that I bought came with a very slim usb-enclosure for the dvd-drive that was left out from the opearation, so basically I didn't need to give up on having dvd-drive either.

 

[Manic Harmonic]

just looked that up, looks pretty cool... not too expensive.

Just for the hell of it, I tried to install on the internal, I managed to clear up some space to where I feel comfortable putting another OS on it. Unfortunately, disk repair will not finish formatting it as ntfs-3g, and bootcamp assistant tells me "could not complete because some files could not be moved." hmm... would this have anything to do with any folders set to read only? I'm asumming not since it made me type my password.