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I have Macbook Pro. I have a portable USB hard drive and I want to install

  • Windows 7
  • Windows XP
  • Ubuntu

on that portable hard drive.

Does anybody know how to install all three operating systems on the drive? I do not want to touch my Mac hard disk or OS X.

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bear in mind, even if this is possible, running an OS like Windows over USB would be painfully slow. – tombull89 Jun 17 '11 at 7:35
@tombull89 slow is ok for me. – Rahul Vyas Jun 17 '11 at 8:00
Windows XP will not run on a USB device without some serious hacking. – Randolph West Jun 17 '11 at 16:30
For the Linux part, use UNetbootin. It's a dead-simple application to use. You go through the wizard, select the Ubuntu ISO file, select the distribution and the external hard-drive, and you're set. For Windows 7, here is a very detailed howto, but it requires a Windows installation to begin with. I'm not too sure it'll just run on the Mac without any further hacking. – slhck Jun 18 '11 at 15:20
@slhck I don't want bootable windows. I just want to install windows on an external hard drive instead of internal because my internal has mac osx and I don't want to touch it. – Rahul Vyas Jun 18 '11 at 17:04
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migrated from serverfault.com Jun 17 '11 at 8:23

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1 Answer

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Your best bet is to defragment and then partition your hard drive.

It's virtually impossible and really impractical to run Windows off an external/flash drive. If it's for programs that do not require much computing power, use VMware or Fusion...

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