MBP Dual Hard Drives - Windows 7 - No Superdrive

[Cattywampus_]

Hi guys,

Hoping you can all help.

I just swapped the superdrive in my Macbook Pro 17inch Unibody with a hard drive.

I have an SSD on the primary port and the original 500gb HDD where the superdrive was. The drive works fine no hardware problems.

I wanted a drive structure like this:

SSD 128GB - 1 Partition:
Solely for OSX

HDD 500GB - 2 Partitions:
200 GB HFS+ File System / 300GB NTFS for Windows

Now I thought 'how hard can it be to install Windows 7 without a superdrive'. Must have spent about 5 hours trying to get it working and for some reason I couldn't.

What I have tried :-


• I have a USB thumbdrive with my Windows 7 ISO - created with the Windows 7 USB/DVD Tool.

• Plugging that USB thumb drive in and holding ALT at boot - not able to boot from the USB drive.

• I have tried formatting the USB stick with both GUID and MBR partition maps. Neither worked.

• I installed REFIT and tried to boot from the USB stick. When I booted I had my SSD drive plus what looked like 2 windows icons each with an external drive icon in the corner. Selecting either of these simply resulted in a blank screen with no progression. Switching the MBP off and rebooting was the only option.


I must stress that I need to install Windows to the 300GB partition on the HDD. I really need 200gb of the HDD to store data while working in OSX. Is this possible?

Any help appreciated.

Thanks

 

[Cattywampus_]

Sorry to bump.

Desperate for help!.

Thanks

 

[Sincci]

If the superdrive that you removed is still functional, I would suggest getting some kind of usb enclosure for it. My optibay adapter came with one and it allowed me to install Windows without any issues.

 

[Cattywampus_]

Hi

I managed to fix it this afternoon using a guide from here (involving Parallels desktop).

Windows working perfectly!

Thanks for the tip. I do have an enclosure on order.

I was however lead to believe that even with an external DVD drive you couldn't install Windows.

 

[karolis30]

Hi

I managed to fix it this afternoon using a guide from here (involving Parallels desktop).

Windows working perfectly!

Thanks for the tip. I do have an enclosure on order.

I was however lead to believe that even with an external DVD drive you couldn't install Windows.

So what have you done? I'm in the exactly the same situation, and did all your previous steps