Hey I have a Macbook Pro and I currently have my SSD partitioned to allow me to install Windows. I was thinking about buying an external hard drive, splitting it into two separate partitions using; 1 as a Time Machine backup for my SSD on my Macbook, and 2 as a Bootcamp partition to run Windows off of. So a few questions; 1.
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Is it possible to run Windows from an external hard drive? (I have USB 3 and will be buying a USB 3 hard drive - I say this because I presume it's possible and that speed will just be the bottleneck?) 2. Is it even possible to split the drive into two partitions and use it for these separate needs? I found the following recipe at the link below. I haven't tried that and it might make the difference, but I found an 'easier' way: Use a free tool called Win2Go. I think it probably does exactly what you described, but it does it for you.
Guide follows. What you need: a.iso or.img of windows 8.1 (should work with other versions, but this guide won't be quite right) a windows install usb stick you created with boot camp (make sure you had the second option, 'Download drivers,' checked. The drivers are what we care about.) A windows machine with administrator privileges and (preferably) USB 3.0 ports a Macintosh computer (duh!:D) Get a.iso of Windows 8.1 (it can also do earlier versions, but this is the one I know). If you have a.img like I did, simply rename it as a.iso. DO NOT have your bootcamp usb stick plugged in during this entire process. It gets very confused and tries to install windows to your internal drive around step 10 if you do.
Partition the drive you intend to install windows on. I did this using MacOS's Disk Utility because I knew how.
Anyway, make at least one partition on the drive named 'WINDOWS' with at least 20 GB of space (could use less, but if you want to be able to do anything later, more is better.) The format of the partition is unimportant at this point. Get access to a windows device as an administrator. I used a bootcamped macmini running windows 7. Put the windows.iso from step 1 somewhere the windows account from step 3 can see it (i.e. On a flashdrive).
Download Win2USB from and install it. You can do steps 6 and 7 while this is occurring, but it should be pretty fast. Plug the drive into your windows device, preferably via a USB 3.0 port. Right click on the 'WINDOWS' volume that should appear in windows explorer. Choose 'format' and format the partition to MS-DOS. Start up Win2USB and work through the wizard: Choose the.iso from steps 1 and 4 as your source. Make the WINDOWS partition both the system and boot partition (you could get fancy and make two, but I didn't bother).
This will take some time; try not to do anything on the computer while it is installing. I maxed out my internal drive's read/write speed during this process. Once it is done, EJECT the harddrive (windows may refuse to do this; if so, simply turn the computer off before removing it). Plug the drive into your mac and hold down OPTION while it starts up. You should see a screen with all of your partitions shown, plus one (or possibly two) orange things named windows.
Use the arrow keys to pick either of the windows choices (they are actually the same thing as far as I can tell) and hit enter. It should boot into windows and take a LOONG time, then shut down. Do step 10 again and it should boot fully, as well as asking for your product key. Make sure it takes your product key and boots fully. Things may look weird and you probably won't have internet access; the next steps fix this.
Boot your new windows partition and then insert the bootcamp flashdrive (NOT the other way round). Navigate to the folder on the flashdrive called BootCamp and run setup.exe. It will install the drivers you need to make your apple wifi chips, graphics stuff, keyboards, etc work properly. The screen will probably do strange things during this process and especially as it is finishing. Reboot, possibly more than once. Basically, you just keep rebooting until it stops doing weird stuff. It took me two cycles.
![Can I Run Setup.exe For Mac Osx From Usb Drive? Can I Run Setup.exe For Mac Osx From Usb Drive?](/uploads/1/2/4/0/124058602/767128544.png)
Everything should work at this point. If not, I forgot something.
![Can I Run Setup.exe For Mac Osx From Usb Drive? Can I Run Setup.exe For Mac Osx From Usb Drive?](/uploads/1/2/4/0/124058602/185186745.png)
Bootcamp can't run Windows from an external drive. It has to be run from the OS X drive. The easiest solution is to install OS X on the external drive.
Boot the external drive into OS X and install Windows via Bootcamp. Once installed you'll need to boot twice (once to external drive and once to Windows) but it's easy to set up, it's standard and it's all supported. However, unless you need raw hardware performance for Windows you're better off running Windows using a virtualization solution like Parallels or VMware Fusion. Using this solution, you can store the VM image and run it from the external drive. BTW: Bootcamp does the partitioning as you install Windows so there's no need to manually partition.