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    my plan to get win 7 on 2nd hard drive...

    Discussion in 'Apple and Mac OS X' started by seanmophoto, Nov 7, 2011.

  1. seanmophoto

    seanmophoto Newbie

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    Hi all,

    I recently bought a new 15" MPB with an apple installed 128gb SSD drive.

    My plan was to install a 2nd hard drive in the DVD spot, a 500gb with a 70ish GB win7 partition. I would like to use Win 7 for screencasting for windows tutorials and for Gaming...mostly for gaming

    I thought, naively, that this would be a simple boot agent setup...boy was I wrong.

    I have already installed the 500gb drive in the optibay, it is working fine

    I did not realize that a macbook pro cannot boot to an external drive or dvd. I could be wrong here but all my research seems to indicate that it can't...using something like refit does not fix this problem

    I tried going through the boot camp setup with my external dvd drive attached through USB...did not work
    also tried a USB thumb drive...no dice


    I'd like to avoid having win7 on my 128gb ssd as there is limited space

    my current plan is this...if it doesn't make sense or seems wrong please let me know

    put the dvd drive back in
    make a bootcamp partition on the sad...maybe 35gbs
    install win7
    if thats working ok put the hard drive back in
    use win clone to clone the bootcamp win7 to the hard drive
    hopefully that will work...

    I'm just not sure how I'm going to partition the drive
    I would like a 100gb ntfs partition for windows
    and the rest partitioned mac
    looks like win clone can expand the image to the larger partition

    ipartition seems like it would work for this, but not sure

    any ideas on how I can make a ntfs partition on the internal?

    can I partition the drive with a windows machine? maybe do the 400gb as exfat?

    thanks
     
    seanmophoto, Nov 7, 2011
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  2. joer80

    joer80 Notebook Evangelist

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    I think osx must boot in its filesystem even if you install the driver that lets it write to ntfs..

    Maybe you could cut the ssd in half, install osx on c as hfs+, put windows 7 in d as ntfs, and then make your entire second hard drive a datadrive for both os's in ntfs or extfat as drive e. (If ntfs, install that driver that lets macos write to it.)

    That way both os would have ssd, and would share your data files.

    Put your favorite programs on SSD of course.
     
    joer80, Nov 7, 2011
    #2