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Boot Vista From External Hard Drive?

Cristobol

Cristobol

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jul 18, 2007
19
0
Michigan, US
I was wondering if i could boot vista from this: (The reason why because i don't want to mess with my macbook pro, i just bought the new 15.4' 2.2. I've been reading that you might be able to boot xp pro sp2, not sure and i don't even know if it would be practical because i would want to play my windows games on it.

Western Digital / Extreme Lighted / 160GB / 7200 / 8MB / USB 2.0/Firewire / External Hard Drive

Capacity (GB): 160
Interface: USB 2.0/Firewire
Spindle Speed (RPM): 7200
Buffer Memory: 8MB
Average Seek (msec): 8.9
Data Transfer Rate on USB 2.0: Up to 480 Mb/sec
Data Transfer Rate on FireWire: Up to 400 Mb/sec
Temperature, Operating (°C): 0 to 60
Temperature, Nonoperating (°C): -20 to 65
 
Parallels or Vmware Fusion can boot off an external drive. However, boot camp cannot currently. If you are wanting to game, you will want to use boot camp. What do you mean by mess up? Once it is partitioned, it won't mess up OS X. I guess some people have trouble with it partitioning, but I've installed boot camp on 4 MBP's without any trouble.
 
DoFoT9 said:
no vista is gay in that respect... dont support external boot drives, unless u get a esata card and external esata drive... otherwise ur stuffed.
Click to expand...


Has windows ever booted up from an external drive? i tried XP once and it didn't they suck.

I got Tiger on my FW400 Drive and it's so fast, you cant even tell its external, it rocks. Wish vista were like that, we could just have it over in an external partition.
 
ivnds said:
Has windows ever booted up from an external drive? i tried XP once and it didn't they suck.

I got Tiger on my FW400 Drive and it's so fast, you cant even tell its external, it rocks. Wish vista were like that, we could just have it over in an external partition.
Click to expand...

oh really i thout it was just vista that dont boot nemore. yeap i have tiger (a backup) booting from me external. so good to kno that u can have a working copy on an external harddy.
 
Thanks, I'll just use bootcamp and install vista on my internal hard drive. (As much as I hate to do that, poor apple :-( lol )
 
Here's your solution: http://www.ngine.de/index.jsp?pageid=4176

Windows does not natively support USB/FireWire booting at this time, so you need to follow those instructions to enable that functionality. I'm still in doubt that XP will boot from FireWire, however.

As for the suggestion of obtaining an eSATA card, I suppose the poster meant one to go in your MBP's ExpressCard slot. If this is the case, this is still unlikely to work, as the eSATA card's drivers are loaded during the actual OS bootup. Unless XP or Vista have some sort of pre-bootloader type of mechanism on the internal drive to load the eSATA card drivers and locate the location of an OS on that drive, you would not be able to boot off of that drive.
 
lag1090 said:
Here's your solution: http://www.ngine.de/index.jsp?pageid=4176

Windows does not natively support USB/FireWire booting at this time, so you need to follow those instructions to enable that functionality. I'm still in doubt that XP will boot from FireWire, however.

As for the suggestion of obtaining an eSATA card, I suppose the poster meant one to go in your MBP's ExpressCard slot. If this is the case, this is still unlikely to work, as the eSATA card's drivers are loaded during the actual OS bootup. Unless XP or Vista have some sort of pre-bootloader type of mechanism on the internal drive to load the eSATA card drivers and locate the location of an OS on that drive, you would not be able to boot off of that drive.
Click to expand...

Yeah it looks like only Motherboard based esata (Mac Pro or PC) will boot external drives. No boot bios support in EFI from expresscard slot (yet!).
:(

Cheers,
 
AbsenceOfTruth said:
I'm wondering about this as well... will Vista ever be able to boot via external drive on the MBP?
Click to expand...

of course they can do it.. the question is will they... the answer is no. thats what i think. its totally gay. the only way ill be able to get vista running is by upgrading my HDD in my mbp. i only have 10gb on xp now. thats all i can afford.
 
this sucks,
anyway, i want to use the external for leopard server, just to learn it. will it work?
 
You can boot vista off of an external HD. all you have to do is have the harddrive plugged in, and boot of your cd by holding down C. when the setup starts you will eventually have to pick a drive. just pick you external ms dos formatted harddrive. however this is as far as i could get. my cd didnt seem to have the drivers to load on the external hd so i could intsall vista on it. anyone know were to get them?
 
Crown16 said:
You can boot vista off of an external HD. all you have to do is have the harddrive plugged in, and boot of your cd by holding down C. when the setup starts you will eventually have to pick a drive. just pick you external ms dos formatted harddrive. however this is as far as i could get. my cd didnt seem to have the drivers to load on the external hd so i could intsall vista on it. anyone know were to get them?
Click to expand...

no you cant. vista only boots off internal hard drives that are NTFS formatted. i dont know what your doing but it would never let me do it.

there are no drivers for external HD support.
 
lag1090 said:
Here's your solution: http://www.ngine.de/index.jsp?pageid=4176

Windows does not natively support USB/FireWire booting at this time, so you need to follow those instructions to enable that functionality. I'm still in doubt that XP will boot from FireWire, however.

As for the suggestion of obtaining an eSATA card, I suppose the poster meant one to go in your MBP's ExpressCard slot. If this is the case, this is still unlikely to work, as the eSATA card's drivers are loaded during the actual OS bootup. Unless XP or Vista have some sort of pre-bootloader type of mechanism on the internal drive to load the eSATA card drivers and locate the location of an OS on that drive, you would not be able to boot off of that drive.
Click to expand...

i tried this for about an hour, and couldnt get it to work. Found all the files, and edited them according to directions, but no go on a FW400, or a usb Drive.
 
you can do what i did..

install vista on a small partition on the main drive and install all your games and stuff on an external
 
Well the weird part is i just install it like on any normal computer i would put the disk in, boot the comp holding down c, Then i get the bios startup. and then in colour vista. i fill in all the stuff that they ask. and then i have to pick a startup disk.. but they ask for an extra driver.. because there is no support driver for external disks on the cd itself..
 
Freyqq said:
you can do what i did..

install vista on a small partition on the main drive and install all your games and stuff on an external
Click to expand...

Im gunna try what you did. i had a 25gb partition for vista erased that how can i add the 20 gigs back to my mac(main) partition?
 
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