I'm posting this for other's sake. I recently got a Data Doubler from OWC and swapped out my optical drive for a sweet Samsung 840 SSD on my mid-2010 MBP. I decided for the first time in years to install Windows in a small partition on the SSD so I could play PC games, putting the game data on my 750 GB traditional HDD (BTW MacDrive from Mediafour is required to read and write the HFS+ volume for doing this; HFS+ is read only by default in Boot Camp). The SSD is fast enough in rebooting that it doesn't bother me in switching between OS's as much.
The problem was that the Boot Camp installation would freeze while loading files for the Windows installer when I used an external optical drive. I searched high and low for a solution and I finally found an older article that talked about this in regards to doing it on an MBA:
Install Windows on Macbook Air with no external drive - (Inside The Brackets)
The solution is not simple, requiring Parallels to start the Windows installation and then using it to create a custom master boot record (MBR) for the SSD so the Mac sees the Windows partition as bootable (Parallels normally creates this for using a Boot Camp volume as a Windows drive, but this is only written to the VM, not the Mac hardware). I posted the anonymous comment at the bottom about using the Lion or ML recovery volumes to do the same thing.
If anybody has an easier solution or any comments on this process, I'd be interested to hear it.
Steve
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