MacOS – Move Bootcamp to external drive – restored, fdisk – still not recognized as bootable!

bootcampdisk-utilitymacospartitionwindows

I want to copy my W7 Bootcamp partition to an external HDD, and be bootable of course. It is currently functioning fine alongside Yosemite on a different HDD.

DiskUtility Restore works…
I marked the partition as active…
But the new Bootcamp partition is still not recognized on start-up.

Please help!

Details:

  1. Currently using (and working from) Yosemite OSX10.10.2 on an
    internal SSD.
  2. Source: HDD1 (external-USB) works fine and can boot as W7 or Yosemite. This is the original Bootcamp partition I want to clone or copy.
  3. Destination: HDD2 (external-USB) is blank and much larger than the HDD1 Bootcamp partition. This is the drive I'd like to copy my Bootcamp partition to and have it bootable.
  4. The HDD1 Bootcamp partition was origninally made with OSX10.6.8.

I have tried:

  1. Formatting HDD2 as GUID-FAT32; using DiskUtility to 'restore' the HDD1
    bootcamp partition to; using sudo fdisk to mark as active;
    everything seemed to go great but it doesnt get recognized upon
    boot-up.
  2. Same as above but formatting HDD2 as MBR-FAT32.
  3. Running disk repair after step 1, looks good.

My fdisk commands:
sudo fdisk -e /dev/disk1; p; setpid 1; 07; flag 1; p; write; y
…seems to work. See attached image.

What am I missing???

Thanks in advance.
fdisk commands

Best Answer

Windows 7 will not run from an external USB hard drive. This is a limitation of Windows, not your Mac. Windows can ONLY run from an internal, non-removable hard drive. That limitation applies even on a real PC.