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^squirrel^

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Apr 4, 2006
651
1
England
Hi all,

Im in the process of either buying a 24" iMac or Macpro. Still not 100% but i've got a question on the iMac side of things.

I would like to keep OSX and XP on different drives, if i buy an external SATA caddy and use one of my space drives, how will XP perform? I will be gaming in XP so it will need to run pretty well. Has anyone got XP install on a USB ext drive?

Many thanks

Darren
 

mrgreen4242

macrumors 601
Feb 10, 2004
4,377
9
I'm not 100% sure about this, I don't have an Intel Mac yet... BUT, I think that with BootCamp you HAVE to have both your OS X and Windows partition on the same 'master' drive.

I think. I'm not positive, but I swear I read that somewhere. So, you'd be in the same boat for either system...

Someone please correct me if I am wrong...
 

^squirrel^

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Apr 4, 2006
651
1
England
mrgreen4242 said:
I'm not 100% sure about this, I don't have an Intel Mac yet... BUT, I think that with BootCamp you HAVE to have both your OS X and Windows partition on the same 'master' drive.

I think. I'm not positive, but I swear I read that somewhere. So, you'd be in the same boat for either system...

Someone please correct me if I am wrong...

With the new firmware, you can install to a drive thats not the primary.
 

mrgreen4242

macrumors 601
Feb 10, 2004
4,377
9
^squirrel^ said:
With the new firmware, you can install to a drive thats not the primary.

AH, I was unaware of that. The other thing to consider is the poor SATA in XP with the MacPro, unless that's been fixes already.
 

bearbo

macrumors 68000
Jul 20, 2006
1,858
0
mrgreen4242 said:
AH, I was unaware of that. The other thing to consider is the poor SATA in XP with the MacPro, unless that's been fixes already.
with some hack and such, you can get windows run off external with USB, i dont know if firewire method has been confirmed...

but i wouldn't play game on it... i have a seagate external that i run another version of OS X off, but the hdd keeps on going to sleep after a bit of inactivity (i know, you won't be inactive while gaming, but still... (or perhpas there's a simple fix for that, that i dont know, if so, pray tell), and also, the external running operating system isn't as fast as internal, from what i experienced.
 
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