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Dual boot with 2 HDD (late 2008 macbook unibody)

M

monarchy

macrumors member
Original poster
Jul 4, 2010
41
0
I recently purchase a SSD that I am using for my primary hard drive. I plan on putting my old hard drive in the optical bay so I can use it for Windows 7. I can't seem to find a clear answer on wether it's possible to boot Windows 7 from a hard drive in the optical bay.

Also, is it possible to use virtualbox and install it on the hard drive in the optical bay and install Windows 7 that way?

Can someone clear this up for me?

Thanks!!
 
You sure can, I installed OS X on my SSD, and I had Boot Camp with Win 7 installed to my HDD. Frees up space, and works perfectly fine. I actually had my Boot Camp partition on there, as well as another OS X partition for storing data.

Looked something like 120GB SSD in optical bay (OS X), 750GB HDD in HDD bay (650GB OS X Data, 100GB Win 7).

This is on a Late 2008 MacBook, and now in my 2010 MBP with no changes.
 
BrettApple said:
You sure can, I installed OS X on my SSD, and I had Boot Camp with Win 7 installed to my HDD. Frees up space, and works perfectly fine. I actually had my Boot Camp partition on there, as well as another OS X partition for storing data.

Looked something like 120GB SSD in optical bay (OS X), 750GB HDD in HDD bay (650GB OS X Data, 100GB Win 7).

This is on a Late 2008 MacBook, and now in my 2010 MBP with no changes.
Click to expand...

Is there anything special I need to do? What was your procedure for getting everything up and running?
 
I personally have the OWC Data Doubler, but a generic one off Amazon should work just fine. There's one for $8 that should do the trick.

I just installed OS X on my SSD, partitioned my HDD for OS X data, then ran the Boot Camp installer to put the Windows partition on it, and installed Windows. Pretty simple compared to other multi boot situations. I've got somewhere around 100+ bootable tools on a flash drive I made for testing using Syslinux, little more complicated with that guy, lol.
 
This is hard but not impossible using bootcamp. Bootcamp for macs that are supposed to have an optical drive expect you to install windows 7 with a DVD install disc, which means you need to take out the data doubler. There are some tricks to install windows 7 with a flash drive, but then again you have to follow tricky procedures. It's must easier to install windows 7 onto the SSD, and later take out the optical drive and replace it with the hard drive. It's probably much better doing the latter method because you could use the hard drive as a read/write drive that both windows and mac can share.

You could also use virtual box on the hard drive but you might need to format the hard drive as a mac-friendly partition. It might run pretty slow since it's going to be a compressed OS running off a hard drive. It's probably a lot faster to keep the virtual box on the ssd.

monarchy said:
I recently purchase a SSD that I am using for my primary hard drive. I plan on putting my old hard drive in the optical bay so I can use it for Windows 7. I can't seem to find a clear answer on wether it's possible to boot Windows 7 from a hard drive in the optical bay.

Also, is it possible to use virtualbox and install it on the hard drive in the optical bay and install Windows 7 that way?

Can someone clear this up for me?

Thanks!!
Click to expand...
 
I see absolutely no reason why brackets from other sources than OWC would not work. I've seen lots of cheap ones on Ebay that should work with zero problems.

Here is one example that I found in under one minute of searching.
 

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