XP on a separate hard drive

[TayHarley]

Hi - just when I thought I was ready to flex plastic and move from PC to iMAC , at last.

Last thing to check off my list, I was worrying about is the large number of detailed Excel files I have not running under MACOffice.

Now I'm sure I found, then lost, a post about running XP on a completely separate hard drive using Parallels software. Spoke to Apple Store yesterday and they said it couldn't be done - now can't find the post to double check - was I dreaming !!

I'm sure some guy/gal said they'd done it recycling their old PC hard drive via and I thought it would be a good way of a) not partitioning the Mac's drive and infecting it with XP and b) utilise a perfectly good hard drive and XP/Office licenses I'll have left over after the shift.

Has anyone achieved this work around? Or can signpost me to the original post??

Thx . . . TayHarley

 

[T-Stex]

Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac can handle Excel files just fine.

If you aren't planning on getting Office for Mac, instead of dealing with Parallels, why not just take a new hard drive, install OS X on it, and use Boot Camp to create a Windows partition. Doing that will keep the two operating systems separate, and you won't have to deal with any problems with virtualization. If you truly want to keep the hard drives separate, you could use the Windows hard drive in an external FireWire enclosure, and boot from that when you need Windows.

 

[bobjob186]

If you're using parallels, all it does is it makes a disk image and run's the os off that. I run vista off a little mini 80gb usb 2.0 HD and I love it. I save my OS X side from the extra 30GB of Windows and I can take my hard drive around only if I need it. Just do it that way, it'll be a lot better in the long run once you've finished your transitions.