Can someone tell me if I can copy a Boot Camp drive to a new partition on an MBA. The BC is on an external drive from my earlier Mac Pro Tower and it compllete using Windowns 7.
Is this a straight copy job of a disk image or are there other things that need to be down?
thanks
Geoff
MacBook Air, Mac OS X (10.7.4)
Copying operating system software requires special cloning tools. A simple drag and drop will not work. To "clone" a drive with OSX on a Mac you can use SuperDuper (among others) but SuperDuper does not know how to clone a Windows drive. I believe there is a utility called WinClone which will do that but I have never used it. Generally what one does is simply re-install the operating system on the new drive /partition.
I have never used Bootcamp but as Loner T implies, I could see it as being possible that things would have to be set up differently to get the Windows version to work on the MacBook Air than the Mac Pro, and this would be another reason to just go with the clean install option.
Thank you for your responses.
Let me start by saying I am not a techie type so some of your suggestions might need a bit of expanding.
Just to reiterate the situation is this.
I have a fully functioning Boot Camp partition on a separate external drive that started life in a Mac Pro Tower and supplied by Apple when I purchased the unit. It is an Hitachi l640 GB drive.
I no longer have the Tower but need to take everything on the drive over to a partition on my MacBook Air. I am using a third party backup software package (Super Duper) and need to know if, once I have set up the second partiion on my internal SSD drive using Disk Utilities first as I have read you must do and then (I presume) use Boot Camp Assistant to prep that partition. Is that correct? Once that is done is it a simple matter of copying the contents of the external drive over to the partition or is there something else that needs to be done?
My Boot Camp drive includes Windows 7 and I have the original install disk for W7 as well.
If your response(S) can include sorta step by step that would really be appreciated.
Thanks so much.
Geoff
Thanks for your responses so far. I think we are getting closer and my foggy old brain is starting to see a glimmer on the horizon.
Let's try this with a bit more info that I realized I did not include earlier.
I can use the usual stuff to set up the partition with Boot Camp Assistant and then I can reinstalll Win7 from the original disk.
The bigger challenge is getting the programs I need from the external Boot Camp drive to the new internal partition.
I believe copying complete apps on messydos is not as straightforward as on Mac and that of course concerns me, The only reason I am going through this hassle is to install a whole whack of flight simulator software, aircraft, and more from years of accumulation and expense.
So if I am staring to think clearly here, the real challenge is getting all the programs copied over in a way that will allow them to be used.
Is there such a thing as a third party program to do that? I know Super Duper can allow you to select specific files and folders for copy buy I have no ideas where all the silly bits for messy dos apps are stored there than in a whole bunch of places?
Windows partitions have to be cloned with Windows software.
You also need to be aware of differences between drivers for Windows+MacPro vs Windows+MBAir.
Copy Boot Camp to new partition
