Booting to Windows - what I'd like to do

[BasilFawlty]

Ok, the first thing I did when I recently moved from a Dell PC to a 27in iMac was to install Win 7 under Boot Camp (I have too many PC programs to just toss them out).

Anyway, I partitioned my 1TB drive with most of it being MAC OS (Lion) and about 20% being for the Bootcamp partition. I can now boot into Win 7 by holding down the Option Key and selecting the Win 7 (Bootcamp) drive. Works great. But, what I would like to do is the following:

1: Move my current Boot Camp disk image to an external drive so that I can boot into Win, but the bootcamp partition would be on an external drive. (I would like to be able to have a mirror image of my current bootcamp partition and alow my iMac to recognize it and be able to boot from it.

2. Once I can successfully boot to Win on the external drive, I want delete the bootcamp partition on the iMac so that 100% of the internal drive is for Mac OS.

3. Finally, if possible I would like to install a virtual program (like Parallells or other) that will allow me to run the win 7 that is on the external drive as a virtual OS (while MAC Lion is running) but using the external bootcamp partition as the source of the WIN OS. So I would have the option of either booting directly into Win as before, OR running it alongside WIN OS and thus being about to hot switch between the two.

So, is what I want to do possible, and if so what would the process be?

Thanks in advance.

 

[simsaladimbamba]

This guide probably can't help: http://guides.macrumors.com/Boot_Camp_Windows_XP_On_External_Drive

Anyway, it does not seem possible to run Windows 7 from an external HDD.

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[leman]

AFAIK, Windows does not support booting from external drive.

 

[zigzagg321]

Ive tried this and it does not work. Its not possible as far as Ive found.

 

[BasilFawlty]

AFAIK, Windows does not support booting from external drive.

Well drat! Ok, thanks all.

 

[Stan Mikulenka]

Hi Basil,
as a "previous PC guy" you should know that booting win OS from any external HD isn't possible...
What you think changed now that IT WOULD BE POSSIBLE???

 

[BasilFawlty]

Hi Basil,
as a "previous PC guy" you should know that booting win OS from any external HD isn't possible...
What you think changed now that IT WOULD BE POSSIBLE???

Maybe it's because I didn't know that. I used PCs, but I'm not an IT expert nor had I ever had occasion to need to boot to an external drive. It's just one of those factoids I was not aware of because I never had a reason to care at that time. There are probably lots of other things about Window 7 that I don't know as I never used Win 7 until I installed it on my iMac. Posts telling people what they should know because YOU know it are really helpful.