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General discussion

Installing and Running Vista from external HDD

Jan 2, 2011 4:33AM PST

I was wondering about how to install and run windows vista from an external HDD?

Any feed back would be helpful thanks

Discussion is locked

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That's not supported.
Jan 2, 2011 4:38AM PST

You can find articles about it on google but why go down the unsupported path?

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The short answer
Jan 2, 2011 5:49AM PST

The short answer, which Bob alluded to is: You don't.

The somewhat longer answer is that if you try this, you're on your own to fix anything and everything that goes wrong. Also, if your plan is to have a copy of Windows that you can use on a variety of different systems, you're in for a disappointment, because the way Windows is designed, that will fail extremely quickly. Like probably the first time you try and use it on another system.

Macs can do this and so can Linux. The only real precondition there is that the hardware needs to be supported by that version of the OS, and it has to be another Apple system in the case of Mac OS X.

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I installed NT on an external SCSI hard drive ...
Jan 2, 2011 6:43AM PST

long, long ago and Vista is only an updated NT so it should also install to an external SCSI hard drive or even to an external SATA hard drive but unless this would be for some security reason (removing the drive to a locked safe at the end of the work day for instance) it doesn't make much sense as the drive will only be functional as a boot drive on the computer it was installed on (or one with EXACTLY THE SMAE COMPONENTS).

Even for security reasons a computer with hot swap drive caddies makes more sense.

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Need clarification....
Jan 2, 2011 7:47AM PST

So how come you can run windows on a mac?

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That's easier to answer.
Jan 2, 2011 8:30AM PST

Between BootCamp and the other solutions that does work. However you still can't boot and run Windows from the external USB or Firewire HDD on the Apple Mac.
Bob

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thank you
Jan 2, 2011 3:47PM PST

thank you