Change from Bootcamp to External Drive?

[BasilFawlty]

I have a mid-2011 27" iMac with a 1TB drive that I have Windows installed on under Bootcamp. The Bootcamp partition w/ Windows is about 200GB of the 1TB. It occurs to be that I could install Win 7 on an External Drive and boot from than when I need Windows instead of usinf Bootcamp? What I would like to do is do a complete transfer of my current Windows setup to an External Drive (SO O can boot from external), then get rid of the Bootcamp partition so that the iMac HD is dedicated to teh Mac OS and files.

Question - what is the best program that will allow me to copy my total Bootcamp partition w/ Win 7 onto an External Drive? Is this even possible?

 

[Detrius]

WinClone is the only program I've come across that will do this kind of thing.

However, I believe Windows won't boot from an external hard drive.

 

[panzer06]

WinClone is the only program I've come across that will do this kind of thing.

However, I believe Windows won't boot from an external hard drive.

If you go through the hassle of setting up eSATA mod you can clone a Windows drive from a working Windows system so long as it has similar Intel chipset and ATI GPU. I cloned a drive from an ASUS G73 and after dealing with removing all the ASUS bloatware it worked just fine as an external Bootcamp drive (Windows needed to be re-authorized).

Only SATA and eSATA will boot Windows. There is no USB or FW boot support.

Cheers,

 

[Detrius]

True. I was thinking USB/FireWire when I said external. You'll likely be able to boot Windows from Thunderbolt before the others.