Booting from an External Windows Hard Drive

[Italchef]

Hi everyone;
My parents bought a new iMac and have finally made the switch. There's one program on their old hard drive that they need to use. I've installed Windows XP on the new iMac, put the old pc hard disk in a USB2 enclosure and would love to use that to boot off of. The problem is that the iMac doesn't consider that as an option when booting.
The other issue is that if the power goes off and the computer reboots, the default seems to be for the Windows partition and the Mac OSX.
Any ideas?
Thanks for your time,

Mick

 

[telecomm]

There's no simple way to boot from an external drive into Windows. (This isn't a Mac thing, it's a restriction of Windows). You can, however, run Windows applications that are located on an external drive (provided you boot into Windows on a bootcamp partition).

 

[Italchef]

There's no simple way to boot from an external drive into Windows. (This isn't a Mac thing, it's a restriction of Windows). You can, however, run Windows applications that are located on an external drive (provided you boot into Windows on a bootcamp partition).

Ok, that's what I thought. I've installed Windows, then I tried to run the app from the external with no luck. I get some kind of run error. Any ideas around this or what could be the problem? I'm pretty handy with Mac stuff but its been years since I've tinkered with Windows.
Thanks

 

[telecomm]

I'm no Windows expert either, but I'd guess if you had the install discs for that application you could probably boot into Windows, run the installer and select to install the app to the external drive. I've done this with some Windows apps before.