[Ham-Mac] OT - Windows Install on Mac Pro w/ Multiple Internal HD's

[Dino Papas]

Sorry for the OT post but don’t know where else to turn - I want to install (pardon whilst I spit) Windows 8.1 on my early 2009 Mac Pro and do so on an additional internal hard drive dedicated solely to Windows (not the OSX drive in HD bay #1).  The new version of Boot Camp/drivers now support V8.1 so that’s not a problem.  Install will be from a V8.1 DVD and a USB stick for the drivers.  I also plan to run either Fusion or Parallels later but want a native install and once you do the virtualization piece I don’t think you can then also do a native install.

What I don’t understand and can’t seem to find any additional info for is the following note from the Apple Boot Camp site:

	• If you have a Mac Pro with more than one internal disk and you want to install Boot Camp on a disk that isn’t in the first hard drive bay, remove the drives in the lower-numbered bays. You can reinstall the drives after you install Boot Camp.

There’s plenty of info on how to use BC to partition a single drive for both OSX and Windows but nothing that talks about what the above sentence means physically.  If the OSX drive isn’t there where does the BC file come from to partition the drive?  The Windows DVD?  The USB stick?  The machine has to boot from somewhere.

I’m assuming (perhaps incorrectly):

— Of the four drive bays, numbered 1-4 from left to right, that the #1 drive is the OSX boot drive.

— Removing the drives in the “lower-numbered bays” means just that, take ALL of the drives out including the OSX boot drive in bay #1 leaving only the intended Windows drive (it’s in Bay #4).

How do you do all that and THEN boot the thing to the DVD drive where the Windows install DVD is (and oh BTW how do you get it there to begin with?  Again, assumption is the mother of….(you know the rest), I can simply put the DVD in the drive bay before shutting down the machine to remove the HD’s.

Hopefully this all makes sense…anyone else that has done this?

Happy to correspond offline and not take up BW meant for Mac ham stuff.

Maybe I’m overthinking this, not that I’ve ever been accused of doing that before!  ;-)

Thanks in advance!

73 - Dino KL0S

BTW, the main reason I want to run V8.1 is I have a piece of software that when updated recently will no longer run on my very old XP machine, one that is not upgradeable to V8.1 or I wouldn’t be asking; plus I can get rid of that old tower PC by migrating it all over to the Mac.