Question Booting from Bootcamp on an external HDD

[rob1994]

Hi,
My goal is to have an external HDD that has two partitions one small one with Mac OS X and one larger one with Windows on it. I have used WinClone to clone the current bootcamp on my mac to an image which I restored onto the partition I made I followed all the instructions on the website however when I hold option on boot on the mac the bootcamp partition does not appear as a bootable device, it looks like it should work and the bootfile has been replaced. Could anyone enlighten me on why this is not working or how I could achieve windows 7 on an external hdd that is bootable on the mac that would be great. The reason for this is to save space on the internal drive.
thanks

 

[ish416]

OSX does not care where it boots from. Bootcamp will not allow a Windows partition to be loaded from anything but the internal drive.

 

[rob1994]

Damn, okay. Is it possible to make Mac OS X see an external drive as an internal drive?

 

[ish416]

You should be able to install and boot OSX from an external drive.

 

[rob1994]

**UPDATE**
My goal is to have an external HDD which i can plug into the mac and boot windows 7 from, I have cloned (using winclone) my current bootcamp partition and restored it to a partition on the new external drive (the purpose of this is to save space by deleting the internal drive partition). However, when I choose to boot the windows partition from the rEFIt boot screen I get the darwin chimera bootloader in windows that only allows me to choose from the Macintosh HD and the Bootcamp partition on the internal drive could somebody help to rectify this or give me another way to achieve this.
thank you

 

[ish416]

This quote directly from Apple: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3777

Q: I have more than one hard drive, can I install Microsoft Windows on any drive?

A: You can use Boot Camp to install Windows on any internal hard drive, but not on an external hard drive.

 

[mknabster]

Like everyone else is saying, you cannot install Windows from your MAc onto an external drive, but if you install that drive into another machine and install windows on that, then make it an external again, you would be able to boot from that external once the drive is made into a working OS. Upon boot when OSX bongs, hold down alt/option, until you see a list of available partitions. Select the external drive, and it should boot. I use ReFIT as my boot manager which allows me to choose the partition automatically without having to hold down option all the time.