Boot Window 7 on external hard drive from Mac (host)

[Roman4604]

Each to his own.

Dont get me wrong, I am enjoying Lion and the OSX environment, but when the pressure's on and you need to get highly productive, its easier sticking with what you're familiar with.

For now I've fallen into the pattern of Win7 at work (heavy messaging, large sheets, technical reports, presentations, network mgmt/monitoring etc.) and Lion at home (light messaging, browsing & other leisure stuff).

In time who knows, anyway with BootCamp I get the best of both worlds, each at their full potential.

 

[[)roi(]]

Dont get me wrong, I am enjoying Lion and the OSX environment, but when the pressure's on and you need to get highly productive, its easier sticking with what you're familiar with.

For now I've fallen into the pattern of Win7 at work (heavy messaging, large sheets, technical reports, presentations, network mgmt/monitoring etc.) and Lion at home (light messaging, browsing & other leisure stuff).

In time who knows, anyway with BootCamp I get the best of both worlds, each at their full potential.

Custom "bootcamp" solutions are always going to difficult to setup.

As others have mentioned if it's not for gaming then I strongly suggest you use a virtual machine which can be stored as mentioned on an external drive.

Commercial options are; VMWare Fusion and Parallels
Free option is: Oracle / Sun Virtualbox

Running either of these in full screen will give you the same type of experience as working directly on Windows, hence there is no need to take the complicated route -- plus once you get used to using VMs you love the convenience of switching between them and OSX.

 

[Roman4604]

Custom "bootcamp" solutions are always going to difficult to setup.

I found it real easy and completely guided. No more difficult than installing Win on a new PC.

Running either of these in full screen will give you the same type of experience as working directly on Windows

Experience is more than what it looks like, and includes responsiveness under load with a lot of stuff running. As mentioned previously the limitation on the Air is its 4GB RAM and I'd prefer not to carry the burden of 2 OSs loaded into mem.

plus once you get used to using VMs you love the convenience of switching between them and OSX.

Maybe one day when there is a must have/always need app on the OSX side, but currently this is not the situation for me. For now I can live with the switching speed; Restart in OSX Startup Disk util -> Win login = 47 sec, OK in Win BootCamp util -> Lion login = 26 sec

 

[the_lobe]

Virtual machine/Parallels is an option--but it will use up my valuable OEM Mac HDD space. I want to keep it on another drive so I can just use Mac OS X and its documents on the Air (note limited space on SSD).

I am happy to use XP on the external drive--[)roi(] can u show me how to?

Nothing stops you from specifying the virtual disk's location on the external drive...