Newbie-Guest OS on external drive

[alphaparticleman]

Hello;

Please excuse the very basic question. Can the guest OS or even the entire virtual machine be placed on an external hard drive? I would prefer not polluting the relatively small drive on my MacBook with Win 98 or Win XP. In other words, will Win 98 boot from the external drive? And perhaps it also makes it easier to clean out in the event of some problem.

Thanks

[m@riposa]

Of course you can save the image of your virtual disk to any drive connected to and recognised by your Mac. You only have to save the file to your external drive when you use the virtual disk wizard. Next to the field "Image File Name" is a button that opens the Save-Dialog and you can choose the desired place.

Your host system will boot no matter where the VDI-File is located, as long as the drive is available.

[alphaparticleman]

OK, thanks. I'll try it.
The reason I ask is that the Apple people tell me that I can't use Boot Camp to boot Win98 from an external drive; something about Win98 requires being on the primary drive of the box.

[m@riposa]

If you talk about a native installation of Windows, this might be true.
But a VirtualBox container-file just needs to be accessible, there are no problems to be expected.