I'm attempting to install Windows 7 to a 16GB SD card. While I know it's not quite practical, I do have a reason – I want to be able to browser test sites on IE 7/8(Browser compat mode is good enough) as well as IE9. However, I don't want to have 2 Windows installations taking up space on my already tiny 256GB MacBook Air.
I think I'd have no problems doing this with a virtual machine, but I'm stubborn and I think this would be pretty damn cool anyhow.
My initial roadblock is that I can't find the SD Reader's Windows 7 drivers. If I had this on a USB drive, I believe I could load the driver in Windows 7's installer, making the SD card appear as a installation choice.
I know I can create a bootable OS X SD card, so I'm clinging to that as evidence that I can do the same with the Windows 7.
I have downloaded the Bootcamp Windows 7 drivers, but A) they're all .exe's and B) I can't find the driver on the disk anyways (I believe Apple to be the SD reader manufacturer).
End Goal: Windows 7 on 2 SD cards as bootable devices, a backup of the installation on my external drive for quick re-creation of the SD cards.
So, TL;DR – Has anyone done this? And does anyone know how I can get the SD drivers for Windows 7?
Best Answer
Using a virtual machine you can build the system on the local drive then move the entire virtual over to the sdcard and run it from there. I currently do this with USB pen drives for the same reason. I test different applications and do not want several different versions on my harddrive. Yes they are slower but still work fine after they boot up.