Windows Bootcamp on Secondary Hard Drive?

[BeachChair]

I'm about to install a SSD in my optical bay and make that the boot drive for OSX. I want to make a bootcamp partition on my old hard drive, which will henceforth be the slave drive. Is it even possible to boot to Windows when it's on the slave drive?

 

[mulo]

yeah no problem at all, bootcamp will offer you to create a partition on the drive or make the entire drive for windows.

 

[aznguyen316]

Yes I've been doing this for a couple years. Easiest is boot camp partition while the drive is still as your main and use optical to install windows. After that put in the ssd and go.

 

[BeachChair]

Yes I've been doing this for a couple years. Easiest is boot camp partition while the drive is still as your main and use optical to install windows. After that put in the ssd and go.

Ah yea, it's good you tell me before I pull out everything. Forgot that Windows still needs to be installed from DVD.

 

[mac jones]

I'm about to install a SSD in my optical bay and make that the boot drive for OSX. I want to make a bootcamp partition on my old hard drive, which will henceforth be the slave drive. Is it even possible to boot to Windows when it's on the slave drive?

Just a heads up

Unless your playing games, the new 2011 MBPs run virtual images (Vmware,etc.) very well.
I used to have to install a Bootcamp partition, but no longer.

You might give this a try as it's pretty nice being not having to reboot, and saving, moving, duplicating, is great. I run fairly demanding apps in the virtual images without it even denting the cpu. These new cpu's are very robust.

 

[BeachChair]

Just a heads up

Unless your playing games, the new 2011 MBPs run virtual images (Vmware,etc.) very well.
I used to have to install a Bootcamp partition, but no longer.

You might give this a try as it's pretty nice being not having to reboot, and saving, moving, duplicating, is great. I run fairly demanding apps in the virtual images without it even denting the cpu. These new cpu's are very robust.

I've used parallels alot and plan to continue using it mainly. It's just I've had some issues with certain software such as SAS. So I wanna have a true Windows installation for SAS and for some very demanding games like Civ5.

 

[ender land]

Don't forget you can access your bootcamp partition through parallels too which is really nice, allows you to run bootcamp for dedicated things but also access windows for non-dedicated windows programs.

 

[BeachChair]

Don't forget you can access your bootcamp partition through parallels too which is really nice, allows you to run bootcamp for dedicated things but also access windows for non-dedicated windows programs.

That's neat. Then I wouldn't need two windows installs. Maybe I should put the bootcamp partition on the SSD then. Does bootcamp via parallels run as fast as "normal" parallels?

 

[theSeb]

Just a heads up

Unless your playing games, the new 2011 MBPs run virtual images (Vmware,etc.) very well.
I used to have to install a Bootcamp partition, but no longer.

You might give this a try as it's pretty nice being not having to reboot, and saving, moving, duplicating, is great. I run fairly demanding apps in the virtual images without it even denting the cpu. These new cpu's are very robust.

Agreed, but you'll need 8 GBs of RAM. I've found running windows 7 in a VM to be painful with 4 GB. Much better with 8.