I have a 2011 MBP and I just replaced my optical drive with a hard drive. I wanted to know the easiest and free way to boot up windows 8.1 on one of the hard drives using only the iso and a flash drive.I attempted using bootcamp, but it wouldn't work because I don't have an optical drive anymore.
MacBook – Using Windows on another HDD on a Mac
bootcampdual-boothard drivemacbook prowindows
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Best Answer
You should be able to simply boot up off of the Windows USB installer, and install onto the second drive. You may need to temporarily remove the OS X drive before installing, as I have heard windows doesn't like seeing other OS's. You may want to do anyway, just to make absolutely sure you are not harming the OS X install.
Once you have it installed, you will want to install the Bootcamp drivers. You should be able to download them online.