Macbook Pro (Late 2011) Bootcamp and USB boot questions

Look here:

• How can I install boot camp off a Windows 7 USB flash drive?

and here:

• Install Bootcamp Windows7 off external USB optical drive on Lion system

Maybe rEFIt will work for you too, but be aware of this:

• Installed reFIT on Lion and now I can't login

I have solved this myself on a Mac Pro with 6 internal disks, where I wanted to install BootCamp on a already partitioned disk which isn't the primary disk.

I've made a few notes about it here, but it's rather technical and incomplete: Install Windows without BootCamp Assistant

The other "problem" for me is that I can't use the "Startup Disk" System Preferences panel to choose that partition to boot Windows from.

As a work-around, I use two tricks:

1. I hold down the Option key at startup so that the Mac shows me a list of all bootable disks, including the Windows partition.

2. I use a shell script which finds the Windows partition and set it as a one-time startup partition, which is a hint I got from MacOSHints. The script follows and should be saved as "BootCamp.command":

    #! /bin/bash
    diskutil list > /tmp/connecteddrives.txt
    INPUT=/tmp/connecteddrives.txt
    driveid1=$(grep Microsoft "${INPUT}" | awk '{print $8}')
    echo $driveid1
    sudo /usr/sbin/bless --device /dev/$driveid1 --setBoot --legacy --nextonly
    rm /tmp/connecteddrives.txt
    osascript -e 'tell application "Finder" to restart'
    exit 0