Removable System drives

[Woggie]

Hey, I'm about to do my second build for my dad this time. He's always been a PC guy but is interested in the whole hackintosh thing.

He's going to be installing windows 7 on an SSD and then OSX on separate SSD but what he's wondering is once installed will he be able to fully remove the mac drive and still boot to windows and vise versa. I'm pretty sure this is possible but just wanted to be fully sure. Also Is it imperative that we install multi beast and OSX first or can we start with windows and come back and do the mac stuff later?

The planned build would have the following main components:

Gigabyte X79S-UP5-WiFi E- ATX LGA2011Motherboard

Intel Core i7 3930K 6 core CPU

GeForce GTX670 Video card

Corsair AX850 power supply

32 gig RipjawsZ F3-12800CL 10Q RAM

Thanks in advance for your help, I did a quick search function but couldn't find anything that specifically related to this removable drive concept

 

[P1LGRIM]

I use these :

StarTech 5.25in Trayless Hot Swap Mobile Rack for 3.5in Hard Drive


[AMAZON-uk]http://www.amazon.co.uk/StarTech-5-25in-Trayless-Mobile-3-5in/dp/B000KS8S9W/[/AMAZON-uk]

 

[Woggie]

Cool, those look great. And you don't seem to have any problems booting without one of the drives?

 

[P1LGRIM]

I have three of them.

Top = Operating System
Middle = Spare
Bottom = 3TB data drive split into three partitions : Mac Data / Windows Data / Shared Data

I just shut down and swap the Operating System disk in the top tray.

When I want to back up I put another drive in the middle slot and clone the Operating System drive.

No problems at all so far.

 

[zaptoons]

Yes, it's totally possible (and preferrable) to have OSX and Windows boot completely independently of each other. When you install Windows, just make sure it's the only drive in the system as Windows has an annoying tendency to install its bootloader and other dependent files to other drives in the system if present. Once Windows is up and running you can reattach the OSX drive and the Chameleon bootloader will boot either MacOS or Windows.

Understand you don't have to remove the OSX drive when you boot into Windows (or visa-versa) but so long as Windows isn't dependent on it for the bootloader, you certainly can.

One slight complication that can arise is your default boot device may get changed in the BIOS and only Windows will boot when you put the OSX drive back in, but in that case all you need to do is change the default boot device in the BIOS. Or always swap the boot drive from the same location like P1LGRIM.

Does you dad have a specific reason to remove the OSX drive? Since Windows doesn't natively write to Mac-formatted drives it can't mess with the OSX drive (other than the bootloader issue when installing Windows.) I personally find there's no reason to bother swapping drives physically just to boot one OS or the other, but of course if one needs to for whatever reason, it's perfectly do-able.

 

[Woggie]

great thanks for the advice guys! I'm not entirely sure why he wants to swap them I asked him and couldn't really get a clear answer from him but he's a pretty stubborn guy.