[david06@gmail.com]

Is this even possible? I ask since mac books are fairly expensive. And I'd liek to dual boot xp on a powerbook I wish to purchase. Is there any way this is possible to boot of an external intel mac hard drive. Or does everything have to run intel mac. Any suggestions or answers. I'd gladly appreciate it. Thanks

[jhonizzle]

You can Run XP on a powerbook, but it has to be run through Emulation with a program called Virtual PC http://www.apple.com/macosx/applications/virtualpc/ it will be slow because your running it on a PowerPC chip and not an intel and the PPC chip isn't x86 like the intel. if your hoping to Run games and such it's really out of the question, your graphics card will not support them, but most Windows applications functional although slow.

[sieb]

You can't run XP off an external drive.

[jhonizzle]

you could if you made the external bootable with OS X

[sieb]

You could boot OSX off an external drive, but XP isn't build to boot from an external drive, USB or FW. If you had an Intel Mac, the only thing you could attempt to do is put the boot partition on the internal drive and everything else on an external drive.

[jhonizzle]

what i'm saying is make a bootable external drive with OS X on and and then use that drive as your primary and on that external also load VirtualPC, so as not to use internal hard drive space, and no on an intel mac and ppc mac you cannot have the OS's on seperate hard drives

[harrisjamieh]

No, all he would have to do would be to create a virtual machine in VPC, set it all up, then attach an external drive, and drag the virtual machine file onto the external, and just tell VPC where the image has gone, and it will work

[sieb]

Yep, VPC doesn't care where you put the machine image.

PS, my previous post about booting externally related to XP and Bootcamp by having XPs boot partition on an internal partition and the rest of XP on an external drive. As for OSX, it will boot of an external FW drive if cloned properly and set as the startup disk.