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    boot from external drive?

    Discussion in 'Apple and Mac OS X' started by steve51, Feb 5, 2012.

  1. steve51

    steve51 Notebook Enthusiast

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    I installed Lion and now my XP bootcamp drive no longer connects to the internet as Lion does not support it. I have replaced my hardrive and it has snow lepoard installed along with a bootcamp partition that worked just great.
    My question is can i use it through the USB connection (it is in an external drive enclosure) and just use that for Snow Leopard and it's bootcamp partition. Or could i install it in the optical drive and have 2 separate hardrives.

    I have several programs that i need to use that do not work in a virtual machine, i have tried them on one with no luck. And they do not work with Windows 7, if they did i would just install that in bootcamp.

    Any help would be appreciated..
     
    steve51, Feb 5, 2012
    #1
  2. kornchild2002

    kornchild2002 Notebook Deity

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    I am a little confused as to what you are trying to do. You have an external hard drive and want to put OS X and Windows on that? Or do you have an external hard drive that you want both OS X and Windows to have access to?

    FYI - booting an OS form a USB 2.0 device is not recommended at all (especially if it is a hard drive). The speed of USB 2.0 will drastically slow things down and make them unbearable. Not only that but running programs installed through each OS would be a nightmare (unless you like waiting 10 minutes for the system to boot an another 7 minutes just to open Word).
     
    kornchild2002, Feb 5, 2012
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  3. SP Forsythe

    SP Forsythe Notebook Evangelist

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    I routinely boot to OS X on external drives all the time. Ranging from SD cards, USB Flash Drives to a Thunderbolt RAID 0 setup. The slowest, being a 30 MB/S SD card which takes about 50-60 seconds to boot. Apps are a little slow to launch, but not altogether different than I am used to on several computers at my place employment, which have some 5 year P4 WIN systems.

    Like Kornchild noted, not something that you like to do without a purpose in mind. But it is not so slow as to be impractical.
     
    SP Forsythe, Feb 5, 2012
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  4. steve51

    steve51 Notebook Enthusiast

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    I am trying to get to use my old hardrive so I can use my old boot camp partition and have it run XP with no problems.
     
    steve51, Feb 5, 2012
    #4