Guild Wars 2

Does anyone know if u create a windows partition on a USB3.0 device, and boot windows that way to play?

thnx

I think it depends on your mac – most macs don’t support booting from a USB (or even installing from a USB), especially through bootcamp.

That’s actually not true. You can boot most any Mac made in the last several years from a USB device. It may not be fast, but it’ll work fine.

HOWEVER you’re not asking about booting a Mac but booting WINDOWS. It can be done, but it likely won’t be fast enough to be usable for GW2. Here’s a link w/ the basics:

http://pcsupport.about.com/od/tipstricks/ht/bootusbflash.htm

Since you can’t access the BIOS on a Mac you’ll have to do something like holding down the ‘Option-key’ on startup to select the Windows partition.

Honestly you’d be much better off doing a standard Boot Camp setup.

yes, you can absolutely play GW2 off a USB stick with windows OS on it
trouble is that USB has slower transfer rates than hard drives. HDD is ~100 MB/s, USB 3.0 is at most 625 MB/s. However, most flash drives are incredibly slow (like 5-10 MB/s). There exists flash drives that can transfer 100+MB/s, but they are more expensive and less common (most flash drive manufacturers don’t even state their transfer rates)
All that means, however, is that loading screens (between WP / zones / instances) may take longer.

ekaw.7431:

That’s actually not true. You can boot most any Mac made in the last several years from a USB device. It may not be fast, but it’ll work fine.

HOWEVER you’re not asking about booting a Mac but booting WINDOWS. It can be done, but it likely won’t be fast enough to be usable for GW2. Here’s a link w/ the basics:

http://pcsupport.about.com/od/tipstricks/ht/bootusbflash.htm

Since you can’t access the BIOS on a Mac you’ll have to do something like holding down the ‘Option-key’ on startup to select the Windows partition.

Honestly you’d be much better off doing a standard Boot Camp setup.

I meant booting windows off a USB.. In which case my comment was completely correct. Yes it can be done, but not without the installation of third party software which changes the behaviour of the boot systems…

installation of 3rd party software? I doubt that’s needed.
after 5 min of googling, it looks like I may be wrong there. windows is the problem; apparently it can’t be booted off a flash drive – you may need a special version of it.
https://discussions.apple.com/message/23208544#23208544

Actually the problem is that Windows boots using BIOS whilst OSX uses EFI.
You can’t boot from a USB with windows installed on it through OSX’s EFI setup.
There is a program called rEFIt (or something like that), which will allow you to do it – but you still have to have a mac that is capable of booting from a USB – and only recent macs that ship without a disk drive have this capability.

Even Macs with a disk drive can boot from USB. I work on Macs for a living. They’ve been USB bootable for many years and many generations… disk drive or not.

Also, I use rEFIt and it’s really an EFI and boot drive selection manager. It doesn’t give you a PC Bios replacement but I don’t think you need it. I think if you boot your Mac holding down the option key the PC on USB might show up in which case it’ll be bootable. I’ve never tried this because it would be pretty slow, but I think it might work.

What I’m not sure of is if the Windows installer will let you install on an external anything!

Link for rEFIt:
http://refit.sourceforge.net/

how many years? I can’t remember actually trying to boot from a usb on my G4 tower from 2002, but I never really questioned that I could (I did boot from external HDD). I think flash drives weren’t even big enough to hold a OS at the time…

You can boot from an OSX formatted USB. But to have windows installed on a USB it has to be either NFTS or FAT, which OSX will not allow you to boot from to my knowledge. This is coming from someone who has had to go through a very lengthy processes to install windows on 3 mac’s (two iMacs and a MBP) without being able to use either the disk drive or USB drive…

What I have done in the past is to install Bootcamp on a small internal partition with just enough space and run GW2 off a USB2 drive.

(somewhat related halfway solution)