booting OS from external hard drive?

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Original post by joka Ok, my question is: Is it possible to boot an operating system from an external hard drive? I'm planning on buying a macbook pro, but I don't like mac's OS, Leopard. I'm a windows person, but currently not a fan of Vista either. So I want to know if it's possible if I install Vista and/or Linux [dual boot] and then move the mac's OS into an external hard drive. I'll be running either Vista or Linux on the comp. The point of this is so if I choose to I can use the mac's OS whenever I want but not have it in the internal hard drive to save space.

why are you buying a mac if you don't like osx? buy a pc.

assuming that your BIOS supports botting from a USB device...then it should be possible. however, you cant just copy/paste your OS from your normal hard drive to the external hard drive. you would have to edit some OS files which I am really not sure which ones. otherwise if you have the OS installation disk for the mac, then run a new installation and install to the external hard drive. then put your windows/linux installation on your internal hard drive.

Then you can set in BIOS your boot device priority to the USB when you want to boot to the mac os or to your internal hard drive if you want linux/windows

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Original post by mpipe Quote: Original post by joka Ok, my question is: Is it possible to boot an operating system from an external hard drive? I'm planning on buying a macbook pro, but I don't like mac's OS, Leopard. I'm a windows person, but currently not a fan of Vista either. So I want to know if it's possible if I install Vista and/or Linux [dual boot] and then move the mac's OS into an external hard drive. I'll be running either Vista or Linux on the comp. The point of this is so if I choose to I can use the mac's OS whenever I want but not have it in the internal hard drive to save space. why are you buying a mac if you don't like osx? buy a pc.

it's less expensive than if i was to go out and get a customized laptop. the new macbook pros have a nice graphics card and a lot of the specs i'm looking for

also i heard that it is possible but you won't be able to completely remove the mac's OS from the internal hard drive. can someone confirm this or give some insight to this?

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Original post by ncsu121978 assuming that your BIOS supports botting from a USB device...then it should be possible. however, you cant just copy/paste your OS from your normal hard drive to the external hard drive. you would have to edit some OS files which I am really not sure which ones. otherwise if you have the OS installation disk for the mac, then run a new installation and install to the external hard drive. then put your windows/linux installation on your internal hard drive. Then you can set in BIOS your boot device priority to the USB when you want to boot to the mac os or to your internal hard drive if you want linux/windows

Ofcourse macs doesn't use BIOS.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensible_Firmware_Interface

Booting from an external device shouldn't be a problem unless Apples EFI implementation is really crappy.

Edit: Did a bit of googling and indeed booting from an external drive isn't that difficult, you just need to make sure that you use a GUID Partition Table for that drive if you are booting OS X from it.

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