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Dual Drives - Installing Windows 7 on 2nd drive

And1ss

And1ss

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Oct 20, 2009
542
2
Hey guys,

So I was thinking of going the dual drive route - replace my hdd with a SSD and then move the hdd to the superdrive bay.

I would install Mac OS X on the SSD only. But is it possible to tell bootcamp to install windows on the hdd and not the SSD?

Has anyone done this before?
 
I wish I woulda seen this before I spent two days trying to get it the way I wanted too.

For some reason if I put the SSD in the optibay it would only boot to it if I force it too.

I was also not able to install OSX unless the SSD was in the main bay.

I ended up giving windows 100g of the 250g SSD and splitting the 500g in the optibay 300/200 giving the 300 to OSX.

13 cMBP late 2012 BTW.
 
yusukeaoki said:
Its not possible unless you RAID your drives.
Click to expand...

This can't be right... I have an SSD in the main bay with both OSX and Windows, and an HDD in the optibay with another copy of windows installed (with bootcamp). I can boot from any of the three OS at any time.
 
That is complicated. Way easier to use a VM to install Windows saves all the trouble. All you need one working boot sector which can be reused or redirected. REFIt also helps if one doesn't want to bother too much with the Bootcamp assistant and how it does things.
Option boot works fine with Windows on any drive in my experience.

Personally I think it is a stupid idea. Rebooting into Windows is tedious and slow enough as it is. Having it on a slow HDD too just makes it worse. Better to cut at least a small part of the SSD of at last 40GB to put Windows on it and use the HDD as a data drive. Putting Windows on the other HDD is imo a bad idea.
 
dusk007 said:
That is complicated. Way easier to use a VM to install Windows saves all the trouble. All you need one working boot sector which can be reused or redirected. REFIt also helps if one doesn't want to bother too much with the Bootcamp assistant and how it does things.
Option boot works fine with Windows on any drive in my experience.

Personally I think it is a stupid idea. Rebooting into Windows is tedious and slow enough as it is. Having it on a slow HDD too just makes it worse. Better to cut at least a small part of the SSD of at last 40GB to put Windows on it and use the HDD as a data drive. Putting Windows on the other HDD is imo a bad idea.
Click to expand...

Thats what I do.
VM just lets you select what ever drive you want.
The only problem is, is that it can cut the power in half.
For mine, it can only have 2 cores and 8GB share to support OSX and Windows 7.
Which means I cant due heavy load work.
 
dusk007 said:
That is complicated. Way easier to use a VM to install Windows saves all the trouble. All you need one working boot sector which can be reused or redirected. REFIt also helps if one doesn't want to bother too much with the Bootcamp assistant and how it does things.
Option boot works fine with Windows on any drive in my experience.

Personally I think it is a stupid idea. Rebooting into Windows is tedious and slow enough as it is. Having it on a slow HDD too just makes it worse. Better to cut at least a small part of the SSD of at last 40GB to put Windows on it and use the HDD as a data drive. Putting Windows on the other HDD is imo a bad idea.
Click to expand...

Thats what I ended up doing right there. Windows needs all the help it can get to be faster. SSD surely has to be able to help out a little.
 
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