Running W7 in boot camp..on a separate drive possible?

[The Pontificator]

I've got a couple of WD "Passport" external HDD's lying around.

Are there any issues with running W7 in boot camp...but actually having W7 on a separate, external drive?

[ReliantLion]

I might try this later today. But my question would be this. Can you install, say Windows 7, to an external drive on one Mac, and use it on another? This would be awesome to use if you had a very large USB 'pen drive'.

[billb]

Read this it may help explain what you want.
Also windows checks your hardware.
If you boot on another Mac that is
identical in every way, hardware wise, it may work.
Or not!
If your second Mac's hardware is different
you'll probably need to authenticate it again.
And again, and again, etc.
_________________
2011 Mac mini 2.7 GHz i7 with
16GB RAM, Samsung 512GB SSD
MacBook AIR 11 Inch
Mac mini, Model 1.1, 2.33 GHz C2D Proc
20" iMac G4 PPC

[DonCarlos]

hmm
_________________
'08 MacMini C2D/2.0/RAM4GB
HD:Hitachi 7200/16MB/500GB
OS:LION 10.7/WIN-7
Apple wireless keyboard and Magic Magic mouse .
EXT. HD:Lacie D2Quadra-1TB. Firewire.
Monitors: SONY Bravia 32" and
Dell Ultrasharp 2007WFP (Dell makes something right).

[billb]

[pmcd]

[billb]

[MJL]

Windows 8 will runs from a USB pen drive, however.....

Windows activation checks the hardware and allocates some points to each part. Highest ranking has the MAC address of your network card(s) (WiFi and hard wired). So it just will not work on another computer after changing a few times (used too often).

I'm pretty annoyed with MSN at this moment, have Office 2011 for Mac and changed a HDD (after running CopyCatX which does a supposedly identical clone) and had to reactivate. Had to call MSN for activation. Feels like the activation of Office 2011 on OS X is far more aggresive than under Windows.

[MJL]

After some more navel gazing I think that it might be possible to run a virtual machine on an external drive. I am thinking here about using VMware Fusion. Normally the Virtual Machine will use an MAC address of the host but if I remember correctly you can also use the host with NAT and allocate a MAC address manually. This means that if you move the virtual machine to another computer with the same VMware fusion confiuration the VM (running windows) does not have any inkling it is on another machine.

I suggest to ask on the VMware forums if this is possible - I have for years been swapping an VMware XP installation from machine to machine however it is using an unlimited business XP license.