Dad Hacks

So I've been wanting to do this for quite some time. Those who know me know I bleed brushed aluminium... which is why I can't stand to have part of my drive taken up by any sort of Windows garbage. The unfortunate reality is that OS X still isn't a serious gaming platform (due to a lack of developer support)- and I like to pretend that I have time to play video games. After doing a little poking around on the internet, I was able to get this up and running. I had an extra SSD in a thunderbolt enclosure that wasn't doing anything useful- so that's what I used. The rest of my configuration was a Late 2012 27" iMac with a (home made) fusion drive running 10.8.3.

ANYWAY Here's a quick guide to getting Windows installed on an external thunderbolt drive:

Step 1: Use boot camp to install Windows 7 x64 on your internal drive (this is what I used, I'm sure Windows 8 x64 will work).

Step 2: Complete installing boot camp drivers and apply software updates. Ensure Thunderbolt is functional. 

Step 3: Install and use Winclone on your Mac to make a backup image of the Bootcamp Partition. 

Step 4: Once you've made the backup image, restore that image to your External Thunderbolt drive (I've read that firewire 800 may work, I haven't tried this). When asked if you want to replace the BCD file, yes- you want to do that. DO NOT REBOOT until disconnecting the external Thunderbolt drive. 

Step 5: Restart after disconnecting the destination drive from step 4.

Step 6:  Use the boot camp utility to delete the Windows partition and reclaim the space. CAUTION! This step will destroy your Windows boot camp installation, but hey- at this point you should have the image backed up with Winclone.

Step 7: Connect the external Thunderbolt drive and restart holding option. Select Windows 7 boot camp.

That should do it. After a quick system scan my iMac was up and running with Windows 7 off an external thunderbolt SSD with no issues.