Forums | MacLife

Hi,

The optical drive in my MacBook is dead. I have an external USB LaCie DVD drive that works great. I was able to boot and install OS X v10.6 using it. However, I have been unable to install Windows XP using it. After doing a bit of research, I found out that I can use a program called rEEIt (http://refit.sourceforge.net/ to choose the XP CD to boot from at startup. I was able to choose the CD but when the Windows installer should have come up instead I got a message from Windows saying that it could not find a bootable disc. I have read from some people online that it is simply impossible to boot Windows XP from an external optical drive using Boot Camp and that you have to use the internal drive. Does anyone have any suggestions on how I could make this work? It seems like there must be a way. If there's not a way to boot and install form an external optical drive is there essentially no way for me to run Windows without paying hundreds of dollars to get my internal optical drive fixed?

Thanks,

-Scott