Install Windows onto an external USB drive?

Hi guys,

This may sound like a really dumb question but I've been trying to search through the support documents without any success so I'm hoping somebody on here will have the answer.

I recently bought a Mac Book (the white one), having spent most of my life using PCs. What I really want to know is:

Is it possible to install Parallels and then install the Windows OS onto a seperate external harddrive? So that I can just plug it in when the need arises to use both Windows? Really the only reason is I have a little western digital 120gb usb drive hanging around and there's not a huge amount of free space on my macbook's internal drive so if it's possible to seperate them out like that, it would be absoltuely perfect!

Any help/advice would be great!

 

Yes. I have several VMs that live on an external USB2 drive. It's usable, but kind of slow. If your drive is USB1, I wouldn't bother.

 

Hi Erich, thanks for your quick response. I'm a bit of a tech-idiot when it comes to this sort of thing. So if I buy a copy of Windows Vista and a copy of Parallels, is it simple to install it to the external or is there any technical wizardry that needs doing to make it all work?

 

Sure thing. I don't remember the exact steps, but yes, a copy of Vista and a copy of Parallels is all you need. If you have questions once you start the install, just post in the forum, and I'm sure you'll get it sorted out.

 

"Proper" Vista

Since this will be a VM on the external drive remember that the Vista EULA currently states that only business and ultimate are virtualizable in EULA compliance. The trick in the install will be to inform parallels of the location of the VM during the creation process. Since it is the consensus that Vista only really runs well on 2G and that you will never be able to supply that amount to the VM on a Macbook you will be suffering a double whammy speed hit as you cannot supply enough mem and any windows paging will be going through the USB2 port.
Anyway, I only note the versions as you seemed like you were getting ready to go buy and I was just trying to help you make sure that you did not get a version that Parallels support (?huh?) would inform you was not supported.

Good Luck.