The Notebook Review forums were hosted by TechTarget, who shut down them down on January 31, 2022. This static read-only archive was pulled by NBR forum users between January 20 and January 31, 2022, in an effort to make sure that the valuable technical information that had been posted on the forums is preserved. For current discussions, many NBR forum users moved over to NotebookTalk.net after the shutdown.
Problems? See this thread at archive.org.

    Dual booting from 2 HDDs

    Discussion in 'Apple and Mac OS X' started by azn4lif3s, Mar 9, 2013.

  1. azn4lif3s

    azn4lif3s Notebook Consultant

    Reputations:
    51
    Messages:
    270
    Likes Received:
    3
    Trophy Points:
    31
    I have a MacBook Pro that I put an SSD in and I am currently running OSX only. Is it possible that I put a second harddrive into the CD drive bay with Windows 7 and partition it in a way that I can dual boot Windows and OSX while using the second partition on the hard drive in the CD bay as more storage space for OSX?
     
    azn4lif3s, Mar 9, 2013
    #1
  2. doh123

    doh123 Without ME its just AWESO

    Reputations:
    996
    Messages:
    3,727
    Likes Received:
    1
    Trophy Points:
    106
    sure... partition the drive with NTFS for Windows, an then exFAT for a data partition, and both Windows and OSX will be able to fully read/write to the exFAT data partition.
     
    doh123, Mar 9, 2013
    #2
  3. azn4lif3s

    azn4lif3s Notebook Consultant

    Reputations:
    51
    Messages:
    270
    Likes Received:
    3
    Trophy Points:
    31
    Awesome! Thanks bunches!
     
    azn4lif3s, Mar 9, 2013
    #3
  4. masterchef341

    masterchef341 The guy from The Notebook

    Reputations:
    3,047
    Messages:
    8,636
    Likes Received:
    4
    Trophy Points:
    206
    it sounds like you want to dual boot from drive #1 and use drive #2 as storage for both-

    if this is the case, just to be a bit more clear, you want to use bootcamp to partition drive #1 and install windows, and then manually partition drive #2 as exfat.
     
    masterchef341, Mar 10, 2013
    #4
  5. romanstine9

    romanstine9 Notebook Enthusiast

    Reputations:
    0
    Messages:
    47
    Likes Received:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    15
    The windows OS should be installed on the secondary HDD
     
    romanstine9, Apr 11, 2013
    #5
  6. saturnotaku

    saturnotaku Notebook Nobel Laureate

    Reputations:
    4,879
    Messages:
    8,926
    Likes Received:
    4,707
    Trophy Points:
    431
    Which cannot be done on a MacBook. Windows needs to be installed on the same drive as OS X.
     
    saturnotaku, Apr 12, 2013
    #6
  7. ygohome

    ygohome Notebook Deity

    Reputations:
    210
    Messages:
    1,254
    Likes Received:
    158
    Trophy Points:
    81
    Is that a new restriction? My macbook with two internal drives... windows 7 on the optibay, all by itself... and OSX on the primary drive all by itself.

    I don't remember doing anything unusual to get it setup that way.

    I had it setup that way for years and loved it. Since then, I've upgrade the primary drive to a big samsung 830 500GB ssd. Then I reorganized everything:

    OSX and BOOTCAMP on two seperate partitions of the 500GB ssd. And my data now goes to my optibay 500GB hdd.

    But again, up to about 6 months ago or so I had bootcamp all alone on it's own optibay drive with OSX all alone on the primary.
     
    ygohome, Apr 20, 2013
    #7