Hi, I'm new at using external hard drives, so I'd appreciate a bit of help before I go out and buy stuff.
I have a MacBook that, once I upgrade the RAM, will run practically anything. However, one thing it doesn't do is run Windows, which I've unfortunately been able to find no way around having to use for work purposes. While I do have a copy of Parallels and an XP SP2 install disk, my remaining hard disk space is extremely limited.
I've been guided to purchasing a Western Digital external USB hard drive by several friends who spoke highly of their reliability. I want a 500GB drive, at most, because I plan to migrate a lot of files from my MacBook to the external drive.
I was wondering, though, if it would be possible to partition this drive into 250GB sectors, and rather than have a Windows VM with 32GB of RAM, have a Windows partition on the external drive, which I could boot to and instead have a 250GB hard drive and my MacBook's (soon to be) 4GB of RAM.
Basically, I want an external drive to have a 250GB partition running Windows with my MacBook's hardware specs, and a 250GB partition that uses the Tiger OS X 10.4 I've got currently. Is this possible? and, if so, would it be an involved process, or is an external drive formatted and partitioned just like an ordinary internal one?
Again, I've not used external drives at all so I'd like a bit of help.
Thanks in advance.
I have a MacBook that, once I upgrade the RAM, will run practically anything. However, one thing it doesn't do is run Windows, which I've unfortunately been able to find no way around having to use for work purposes. While I do have a copy of Parallels and an XP SP2 install disk, my remaining hard disk space is extremely limited.
I've been guided to purchasing a Western Digital external USB hard drive by several friends who spoke highly of their reliability. I want a 500GB drive, at most, because I plan to migrate a lot of files from my MacBook to the external drive.
I was wondering, though, if it would be possible to partition this drive into 250GB sectors, and rather than have a Windows VM with 32GB of RAM, have a Windows partition on the external drive, which I could boot to and instead have a 250GB hard drive and my MacBook's (soon to be) 4GB of RAM.
Basically, I want an external drive to have a 250GB partition running Windows with my MacBook's hardware specs, and a 250GB partition that uses the Tiger OS X 10.4 I've got currently. Is this possible? and, if so, would it be an involved process, or is an external drive formatted and partitioned just like an ordinary internal one?
Again, I've not used external drives at all so I'd like a bit of help.
Thanks in advance.