Booting Windows on External DVD Drive

[cullano]

I have a bootable copy of windows 7 (I've checked several times that it is bootable) and I get to the part of bootcamp where it chooses the partitions and it doesn't recognize the cd in the external cd drive I have. Windows will boot onto my macbook (it's a retina mbp) on startup.. could I just partition through the windows startup? is there a workaround for bootcamp to recognize it?

 

[murphychris]

I have a bootable copy of windows 7 (I've checked several times that it is bootable) and I get to the part of bootcamp where it chooses the partitions and it doesn't recognize the cd in the external cd drive I have. Windows will boot onto my macbook (it's a retina mbp) on startup.. could I just partition through the windows startup? is there a workaround for bootcamp to recognize it?

You cannot partition your drive from Windows. It will blow away your Mac OS installation and you won't be able to reinstall Mac OS.

You can do what you want via command line to resize your disk. The instructions are:

man diskutil

To find the max and min resize limits for your disk:

diskutil resizevolume /dev/disk0s2 limits

And the basic form to resize, leaving free (unallocated) space behind is:

diskutil resizevolume /dev/disk0s2 <size>

<size> can be a percentage, i.e. 80%. Or it can be a size in GB, i.e. 250GB. The size you choose is the size for the Mac OS volume. The rest will become free space, which you then need to format (NOT PARTITION) in the Windows 8 installer as NTFS.