Move Bootcamp Partition to another drive. (sticky details)

Question

Move Bootcamp Partition to another drive. (sticky details)

So I want to reclaim some space on my internal drive by moving windows 7 to another external drive, I imaged the windows partition (about 107 GB, and less than half full) and image scanned the .dmg for restore, now when I try and restore it to the external drive (160 GB, 0% full) I get told that the external disk isn't big enough to restore to? Yet it is bigger than the partition I am coming from (by a lot).

I also tried making the partition table on the external into an mbr (thinking that maybe that would make the windows-ey ness happy) but then it wouldn't even try to restore to the disk. So, what am I doing wrong here? I have a key from my University (which they kindly gave me for free) which probably is only good for one install, so I'd like to have another booting copy before I erase the one on my bootcamp partition.

15.4" Macbook Pro 5,3, Mac OS X (10.6.2), 3.06 GHz PC, 4 Gb DDR3 RAM, 320 Gb SATA HDD @7200 RPM

Posted on Mar 13, 2010 2:47 PM

Reply

Answer 1

Mar 13, 2010 3:10 PM in response to Camden Jared Narzt

Update: It's writing! Apparently leaving the external HDD as free space after converting to MBR/BIOS from GUID/EFI was a mistake and all I had to do was make a FAT32 partition (which was promptly erased and replaced during the write procedure anyway XD) anyway I figured I'd add this to the public record.

Reply

Answer 2

The hatter

Level 9

60,980 points

Mar 13, 2010 3:20 PM in response to Camden Jared Narzt

To make an image, three ways to go:

Windows 7 backup and restore
Casper 6
or, to run from Mac OS and save to HFS+ volume, use WinClone from TwoCanoes.com

Apple DMG won't make a valid copy to restore from.

Your key can be used multiple times for the same motherboard, unlimited times.

Reply

Answer 3

Mar 13, 2010 3:25 PM in response to The hatter

Thanks for the info, forgive me if I try and boot from the thing (when it finishes) anyway, I don't think it'll hurt anything to try.

Reply

Answer 4

Mar 13, 2010 4:17 PM in response to The hatter

Ok so my method didn't work (as you said) and windows was unable to create a backup and system image, so what can I do to get this to work (I'd really like to not install any third party apps just to do this one thing)?

Reply

Answer 5

Mar 13, 2010 9:40 PM in response to Camden Jared Narzt

Whatever, I just realized that:
1) I haven't paid for anything on that partition
2) I only ever use it to update it
3) It is taking up lots of space (1/3rd HDD)

So I am going windows free (just before I turn 20) and unless I get hired by Microsoft I am not likely to need to go back.

So I wiped all extra partitions (man i had a lot of them, --I was triple booting with ubuntu thrown into the mix as well--) and now am back to a ~320 GB partition for OSX that boots in 25±5 secs. (multi-booting REALLY slows down your boot, even if you boot straight into OSX it is at least 50% slower on average!)

Will probably put ubuntu back on once lucid launches or maybe even when it's beta, but for now I'll enjoy my super speedy boot times.

Reply

Answer 6

Xster

Level 1

12 points

Apr 5, 2010 4:16 PM in response to Camden Jared Narzt

I had Windows 7 x64 on another partition and wanted to move that to a new drive.
For me, I followed some suggestions online and it actually went quite flawlessly.
Essentially, I used WinClone and restored it onto a fresh partition on the new drive
details: http://tech.xster.net/tips/moving-bootcamp-partition-to-new-drive/

Reply

Answer 7

alder0

Level 1

0 points

Jun 15, 2010 8:52 PM in response to Xster

This post may not be relevant for those primarily working in a Mac environment for which Windows requires only an occasional visit; but for those, such as myself, who only bought a MacPro for hardware and almost exclusively use Windows, a "primitive" backup and bare metal restore utility such as Winclone doesn't measure up.

Within the Windows environment, there is one "enterprise" level utility that meets all the need of those using multiple operating systems, including virtual machines, and that utility is called ShadowProtect, produced by StorageCraft ( http://www.storagecraft.com)--I don't have any connection to this company, by the way, I just researched like crazy to find a backup utility for my Bootcamp machine.

While rather expensive (~$100/yr), this utility is the best Windows backup program I have seen--Microsoft Gold & integrated with VM ware.

Since I couldn't find anything on the internet laying out the details of doing a bare metal restore with ShadowProtect in the Bootcamp environment, I thought it would be useful to document how to accomplish such a restore.

1) Within Windows do a backup using ShadowProtect to create an image file.
2) When the time comes to do a "bare metal restore", from within OS-X use bootcamp assistant to format for windows and exit; reboot from the ShadowProtect W7 boot disk.
3) Use Windows disk manager to reformat the windows partition--not the drive--into NTFS, and set the partition active. This destroys the empty FAT32 shell created by OS-X and leaves a partition map and MBR that can be used by Windows. I guess this is the reason it's so hard to repartition a Bootcamp disk, since the partition map has to be understood both by OS-X and by Windows.
4) Now use ShadowProtect to restore the system drive image using the default parameters which don't touch the MBR, hidden tracks or disk signatures unless you have special requirements--in which case you should research these on the StorageCraft site. ShadowProtect will precisely reproduce the Bootcamp drive, but with the partition boot information tailored to your new OS by Windows. When I did a conversion from my system disk on a hard drive to one on an SSD, it took about 15 minutes to create the backup image on another drive and less than 10 minutes to load it on the SSD. I then rebooted to an unchanged W7 running at incredible speeds on the SSD.

Reply