boot from external drive?

[steve51]

I installed Lion and now my XP bootcamp drive no longer connects to the internet as Lion does not support it. I have replaced my hardrive and it has snow lepoard installed along with a bootcamp partition that worked just great.
My question is can i use it through the USB connection (it is in an external drive enclosure) and just use that for Snow Leopard and it's bootcamp partition. Or could i install it in the optical drive and have 2 separate hardrives.

I have several programs that i need to use that do not work in a virtual machine, i have tried them on one with no luck. And they do not work with Windows 7, if they did i would just install that in bootcamp.

Any help would be appreciated..

[kornchild2002]

I am a little confused as to what you are trying to do. You have an external hard drive and want to put OS X and Windows on that? Or do you have an external hard drive that you want both OS X and Windows to have access to?

FYI - booting an OS form a USB 2.0 device is not recommended at all (especially if it is a hard drive). The speed of USB 2.0 will drastically slow things down and make them unbearable. Not only that but running programs installed through each OS would be a nightmare (unless you like waiting 10 minutes for the system to boot an another 7 minutes just to open Word).

[SP Forsythe]

I routinely boot to OS X on external drives all the time. Ranging from SD cards, USB Flash Drives to a Thunderbolt RAID 0 setup. The slowest, being a 30 MB/S SD card which takes about 50-60 seconds to boot. Apps are a little slow to launch, but not altogether different than I am used to on several computers at my place employment, which have some 5 year P4 WIN systems.

Like Kornchild noted, not something that you like to do without a purpose in mind. But it is not so slow as to be impractical.

[steve51]

I am trying to get to use my old hardrive so I can use my old boot camp partition and have it run XP with no problems.