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BootCamp + External Drive
- Thread starter derajfast
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Sure. http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20030613121738812 (Substitute NTFS for FAT32 if you so desire.)Donz0r said:
[Or get MacDrive and format the whole thing HFS+]
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Problems!
I just got the macbook pro 17" and so far i'm cool with it, but i'm having problems with the whole windows deal. I partitioned the internal HD as soon as i got it for media and for hopefully windows. It is not letting me format my partition to FAT32 nor does it recognize the windows XP cd i have when i start up. I have tried to download all of the FIRMWARE updates, but they won't install because it says my computer is up to date! Any ideas of what i'm doing wrong??
Thanks!
ipedro said:Exactly my friend. I can confirm that this works. I ran into a minor issue when I tried to install Windows using my above described method, none of the partitions were recognized properly (including size) so I couldn't distinguish which one was my internal drive and which ones were my external partitions.
So I simply went into the Terminal under OSX and formatted my external drive as FAT32
newfs_msdos -F32 /dev/rdisk#s1
(rdisk#s1 being my partition's ID ... you need to check that before you run this command)
I then went booted my MacBook Pro from the Windows CD by holding C on startup, installed WindowsXP flawlessly (mind you, I could have installed VISTA, WinME, Linux, whatever) and then booted into Windows after installation by holding CMD+OPTION+SHIFT+DEL at startup.
The final step was to install the drivers that Boot Camp created previously.
Voilá. You read it here first! (Do I get $13,000?
This is the perfect solution for me. I don't put crappy old windows living with OSX on the same drive but I get to keep an external drive on my desk at work. When I arrive at work I simply plug in the external drive, boot into Windows and work on that all day. When I get home, I run OSX.
Lovin' It.
I just got the macbook pro 17" and so far i'm cool with it, but i'm having problems with the whole windows deal. I partitioned the internal HD as soon as i got it for media and for hopefully windows. It is not letting me format my partition to FAT32 nor does it recognize the windows XP cd i have when i start up. I have tried to download all of the FIRMWARE updates, but they won't install because it says my computer is up to date! Any ideas of what i'm doing wrong??
Thanks!
1) Are you using the Terminal commands newfs_msdos -F32 as above or just trying to use Boot Camp.Lessthntim said:I just got the macbook pro 17" and so far i'm cool with it, but i'm having problems with the whole windows deal. I partitioned the internal HD as soon as i got it for media and for hopefully windows. It is not letting me format my partition to FAT32 nor does it recognize the windows XP cd i have when i start up. I have tried to download all of the FIRMWARE updates, but they won't install because it says my computer is up to date! Any ideas of what i'm doing wrong??
Thanks!
2) Just leave the CD in the drive and reboot your Mac. Hold down Option and it should offer you the chance to boot from the CD-ROM and install... Without trying to check your media. (Aside: It would help to tell us what is the origin/version of the XP SP2 CD-ROM you are using?)
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I used the terminal commands to format the hard drive but it's not fooling the windows XP installer. I managed to get the mac to recognize m XP cd, but now it realizes the drive is not internal. Any other ideas to fool the xp installer so it thinks its a regular hard drive?
what if you install windows on an internal drive (fully replacing OS X) and then swap it into an enclosure?
WinXP on a MacBook without Boot Camp
I just tried this and have succeeded in getting Windows installed on an internal disk with no Mac OS (and no BootCamp) installed anywhere on the system. My MacBook is now fully a WinTel machine.
I have also attached an OsX external disk via FireWire and have verified that I can boot to either the external Firewire Mac OsX or to the internal WinXP disk.
At the moment, I do not have an external enclosure that can hold a SATA 2.5" disk and provide a Firewire interface, so I cannot check the reverse. However, I have ordered such an enclosure and will report back when I can test the booting of an external WinXP disk via Firewire.
JurgenWigg said:
I just tried this and have succeeded in getting Windows installed on an internal disk with no Mac OS (and no BootCamp) installed anywhere on the system. My MacBook is now fully a WinTel machine.
I have also attached an OsX external disk via FireWire and have verified that I can boot to either the external Firewire Mac OsX or to the internal WinXP disk.
At the moment, I do not have an external enclosure that can hold a SATA 2.5" disk and provide a Firewire interface, so I cannot check the reverse. However, I have ordered such an enclosure and will report back when I can test the booting of an external WinXP disk via Firewire.
rjr8222 said:
Windows XP will not boot off an external Firewire disk. I have Windows XP installed on an external drive that has both USB and Firewire ports. I boot using the USB port regularly. I have attempted to boot using a firewire connection and it is not possible. Windows does not load the firewire drivers early enough in the boot process. By default Windows does not load the USB drivers early enough in the boot process either but I used a modified Windows install CD that results in a Windows install that does load the USB drivers early enough.
mrichmon said:
Do you know how to alter the loading of USB drivers AFTER a WinXP install,or must this modification be done to the WinXP install disk before installing the OS?
And, if you can twink WinXP to alter the timing of the loading of the USB drivers, why not do the same thing to firewire drivers?
rjr8222 said:
No, I do not have that information.
The difficulty with this is that it requires many changes to the windows registry. Modifying the install CD means that you can make small changes to a couple of config files. The contents of the config files are used to caluculate a much larger number of windows registry entries in the installed system.
The short answer is that USB and firewire drivers at this level in the Windows registry are not equivalent enough to simply swap them. USB drivers are written to be able to be loaded early in the boot process so that usb keyboard support is available immediately after the disk drive drivers are loaded. The change in my system was to get the USB drivers loaded and characterized as a boot disk drive device.
Firewire drivers on the otherhand are not written to be able to be loaded anywhere near this early in the boot process.
I am making broad generalizations in this post in order to avoid having to explain the technical details and differences.
FWIW. The link to the modifications required to keep the USB drivers loaded is in post 43 of this thread.
http://www.ngine.de/index.jsp?pageid=4176
Also, note that many PC BIOSes give some rudimentary ATAPI and PS/2 backwards compatibility to USB devices that allows them to be booted from, until the OS being booted discovers that they are really USB and the proper drivers are loaded.
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http://www.ngine.de/index.jsp?pageid=4176
Also, note that many PC BIOSes give some rudimentary ATAPI and PS/2 backwards compatibility to USB devices that allows them to be booted from, until the OS being booted discovers that they are really USB and the proper drivers are loaded.
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balamw said:
This is precisely the problem with booting unmodified Windows from a usb drive. The BIOS gives rudimentary support so Windows starts booting. Before loading the USB drivers windows unloads all usb drivers including rudimentary support from the BIOS. At that point Windows cannot read anything from the USB drive, but the USB drive is where the drivers are located, but Windows cannot read anything from the USB drive..... At this point Windows is confused and bluescreens.
yeah so......?
So where's ipedro been throughout all of this discussion?? If it was as easy as posted why are there all these problems??
I can't seem to get past the deal where windows tells me, (after selecting the EXTERNAL usb drive) that it is unable to install windows to this disk because,
(quoting windows error)
"Your computers startup program cannot gain access to the disk that contains the partition of free space you chose. Setup cannot install windows on this HD." Then it goes on to say, "This lack of access does not necessarily indicate an error condition. For example disks attached to a SCSI adapter that weren't installed by your cpu's manufacturer or to a secondary HD controller are typically not visible to the startup program unless special software is used...."
I've tried formatting the external in many different formats but it doesn't seem enough to get the drive recognized. I'm curious to know what this "special software" is, if anyone has any clues, i'd appreciate it. Thanks!
So where's ipedro been throughout all of this discussion?? If it was as easy as posted why are there all these problems??
I can't seem to get past the deal where windows tells me, (after selecting the EXTERNAL usb drive) that it is unable to install windows to this disk because,
(quoting windows error)
"Your computers startup program cannot gain access to the disk that contains the partition of free space you chose. Setup cannot install windows on this HD." Then it goes on to say, "This lack of access does not necessarily indicate an error condition. For example disks attached to a SCSI adapter that weren't installed by your cpu's manufacturer or to a secondary HD controller are typically not visible to the startup program unless special software is used...."
I've tried formatting the external in many different formats but it doesn't seem enough to get the drive recognized. I'm curious to know what this "special software" is, if anyone has any clues, i'd appreciate it. Thanks!
Lessthntim said:
It is easy, remove the internal drive and Windows will be happy using the first external drive. For MacBook Pro users this is not easy.
Lessthntim said:
The "special software" refered to is either firmware embedded in SCSI and RAID controller cards, or alternatively device drivers that are written to run on the bare metal. With early SCSI controllers, hooks to extend the BIOS with the firmware of the card were not well developed. So instead of hooking into the BIOS you booted using a floppy disk which installed a driver into memory. This driver remained below the OS in the same way that controller firmware remains below the OS, but it wasn't firmware since it was delivered on floppy.
mrichmon said:It is easy, remove the internal drive and Windows will be happy using the first external drive. For MacBook Pro users this is not easy.
So if i disconnect my internal HD in my mac.... Windows will install to my external, understood. Is this characteristic only applicable to Macs with the intel chip?? Because i took out my HD in my pc and tried to do the same routine, (just to get XP on the External), and i got the same error message
I thought it was referring to the kind of special storage divers that you can select using F6 during the install. (Typically reserved for RAID/SCSI drivers).mrichmon said:
Which I guess raises a point I hadn't considered before. I wonder why some enterprising soul hasn't developed a semi-generic FireWire or USB driver that could be installed after pressing F6 that would allow Windows to boot from external...
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balamw said:
It is also referring to those special storage drivers. I was giving the historical explaination since I didn't want to explain the different between a "special storage driver" and a device driver.
However, this difference is the difference between using the USB drivers as a storage driver, and using firewire drivers as the storage driver.
Lessthntim said:
It might only be characteristic of the intel macs.
I have personally gotten past that message and installed Windows on an external USB drive using my MacBook to perform the install. I have completed this install 4 different times.
Steps:
- Modify Windows install CD to support booting off a USB drive. (Instructions are on the web and have been posted to these forums several times.)
- Remove internal hard drive from MacBook.
- Connect external USB drive to MacBook.
- Boot from modified Windows install CD.
- Progress through Windows install, creating partitions and formating the partitions as you see fit. In most of my installed I partitioned the drive under OS X using a firewire connection to the drive since Disk Tool isn't always happy partitioning USB drives. I have also successfully used a GParted boot disk to partition an external USB drive and then running the Windows installer without modifying the partition table on the external drive.
- Wait for about 34 minutes for the Windows install to finish.
- Reboot into Windows on the external drive.
- Install the Apple device drivers for windows.
- Replace internal drive.
After all of this you will be able to boot into OS X. You will not be able to boot into Windows by holding down the option key when booting. Instead you will need to connect the USB drive to a running OS X system, open the Startup Disk Preference Pane and select the windows partition. Then when you reboot you will boot into Windows. To return to OS X you need to use the Windows Startup Disk control panel to select OS X.
(OS X will also boot if the USB drive is not connected.)
This fiddling with the Startup Disk Preference Pane is a limitation that I haven't found a way to work around. For me, I can live with this since I only boot to Windows occasionally.
mrichmon said:
Thanks for this, it worked great for me. Saves having Windows on the same drive which is always good.
One thing I did notice which might be the same for other MacBookers (and other Mactel owners) who try this: I originally had the USB drive plugged into the port towards the front of the MacBook. Windows gave the error about not having control of the device so wouldn't install. Before giving up I tried the USB drive in the other port (nearest to the MagSafe connector) and it worked fine. Something to bear in mind perhaps - try all your USB ports if not successful on one/some.
Runs fine, even with the page file limitation (2GB RAM helps) and the drive being an old 4,200rpm Seagate from an iBook in a 2.5" enclosure. Still, better than nothing and better than having Windows on the same drive as OSX
EDIT: To format the USB drive, I did it first in OSX via Disc Utility as FAT32, then reformatted to NTFS via the Windows installer. Probably doesn't make a difference but it can't harm mentioning it.
Now where did they put the Convert Post to Guide button!
These last two posts finally give me confidence that it can be done if you put all the pieces together. They should definitely become a Guide and/or a sticky!
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These last two posts finally give me confidence that it can be done if you put all the pieces together. They should definitely become a Guide and/or a sticky!
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