Bootcamp Partition Transfer

I know it's a little short notice, but I ordered a 1 TB hard drive to upgrade the 500 GB hybrid drive in my MacBook Pro. I have a Bootcamp Partition on the hard drive and was wondering what the best method would be to transfer it to the new hard drive. I have an external hard drive enclosure that I plan to put my Mac's current HDD in to transfer files, and I'll keep it in that to use for storage later. I also have a Time Capsule.
What's the best way to transfer my Bootcamp Partition to my new HDD?

Ok, well I'll see if I can find out on Microsoft's site if Windows can restore from an external drive, and if not I guess I'll try Winclone.
I must say, the speed with which I can receive an answer here far surpasses any other form of customer support anywhere.
Thanks for the help!

Similar Messages

  • Windows_7 Bootcamp Partition Back Up?

    If i use traditional windows back up software for a bootcamp partition can i restore from same? I'm reluctant to upgrade to Lion without knowing my bootcamp windows 7 partition is safe and that it could be restored if necessary. I use Time Machine but was told that the bootcamp partition is not backed up by it.
    Any thoughts?

    Ralph below are reproduced a bunch of Bootcamp cloning comments previously posted on this forum.
    I collected these so I would have a ready reference to the topic if needed. I give credit to and thank all the individuals who made these comments even though I do not have specific names recorded.
    If Acronis 2011 w/ Plus Pak would work; Casper 6 does seem to work; Windows 7 has its own built in system image + backup + Windows Easy Transfer - but doesn't work with AppleHFS/MNT (that HFS read-only which confuses Windows 7 backup).
    WinClone was handy for XP users but doesn't for instance check for errors during the backup only during restore (was how I found I had two bad sectors though).
    Known? as I said it has been around and results using are mixed (everyone is different).
    "Some" Windows clones? multi license etc? there are better tools for deploying Windows.
    Acronis 2011 w/ plus pak, didn't work well previously, and they had complaints and issues with Windows 7 - on PC hardware. Check their forum
    Casper 6 - known to work
    Paragaon - they looked like their "Boot Camp Support" might, and they have CampTune; NTFS for OS X; and other products but backup/restore?
    Ghost 15 - probably not, and they didn't like my comment so lost my userid there.
    Windows 7 system backup and restore - Apple's goofy HFS read-only interferes with system and file backup so have to rename AppleHFS and AppleMNT to use. Also, MacDRive8 probably better if you need read and/or write ability to HFS.
    People have used Linux CD (which is what Acronis and others use) on Mac and to update firmware etc on drives and graphic cards.
    Obviously you want to test and have good backups.
    If you are willing to reinstall, then all you need is Windows Easy Transfer (hidden folders like AppData need to be Custom/Advanced included) before and after; and all your updates etc. Then reinstall programs.
    Ah, I don't see how backup of Windows that can't be restored is of any value or use! the whole purpose for backups is to restore files, OS, partitions, etc.
    Yes, Windows 7 SP1 may be more sensitive but people clone Windows all the time.
    I Use and recommend Paragon Hard Drive Suite 2011 because it works great on Mac Pro doing Windows to clone to/from SSD or any other drive. They have separate programs for Boot Camp too
    I have restored from DU, CCC, SuperDuper and TM, they all worked, TM was slower but not a lot, you can boot from the others, which I prefer.
    I have also used Casper, Clonezilla and Paragon but less regularly, Casper failed a few times, I stopped using it, Clonezilla worked but took forever (for me) Paragon (which I have only used twice) was the best but my sample is limited.

  • Bootcamp Partition Wont Mount, Boot and Is not Readable

    thank you in advance to anyone who can be of support.
    I have been running parallels desktop 6.0 on my macbook pro with no issues. I was using bootcamp as my virtual machine. I was also using bootcamp independently with absolutely no problems.
    After upgrading to Lion, Parallels no longer worked and I used bootcamp exclusively. Finally i got fed up with having software that I paid for not work and tried to re-configure parallels to work. I erased all virtual machines and tried creating a new one from bootcamp. Parallels changed the name of my bootcamp partition to "disk0s4." Setup did not complete and now i have no parallels. Further, my bootcamp no longer works. I cannot even access the partition. It is greyed out on disk manager. I ran the recovery tool and tried repairing the partition and got the error: "disk utility cannot repair the disk.....reformat."
    If anyone can tell me how to get this partition working again, it would be a miracle. However, at this point, my sole concern is somehow retrieving ONE folder that was saved on my desktop in windows that has some very very important documents that were not backed up last night. If someone can help me access those files through the mac side, I would be very appreciative.
    I am running Parallels 6.0.12094. I have Mac OS X 10.7 on a MacBook Pro. Bootcamp was running 32-bit Windows 7.
    I have posted this in the parallels forum as well.  I figured someone on this forum would be more likely to adivse me as to whether I can somehow access files stored on the greyed out partition.  thanks.
    I have attached a screen shot of what disk utility states.  Note it says the drive is formatted FAT (ms-dos?)

    Will it run? Yes. You are making some assumptions. There is a thread over on Lion forum and cloning OS back and forth is fine.
    The recovery partition is optional .
    OS X Lion: About Lion Recovery
    OS X Lion: "Some features of Mac OS X Lion are not supported for the disk (volume name)" appears during installation
    Partition Lion + Windows
    Look at coocooforcocoapuffs
    Also, Paragon makes bootable clone drives for Windows (you just can't boot from it on a Mac without it being the internal drive). But that clone requires the entire drive, not just a partition. And not sure what you had in mind. Windows Easy Transfer is for data, not apps, not for Windows OS. But be that as it may.
    Clone X 4 can do sector of an entire hard drive and all partitions. Or clone an HFS volume.

  • Clone Bootcamp Partition from one Mac to another

    All, I just purchased a new MacBook Pro Core-2-Duo. I would like to transfer the Bootcamp partition from my previous Core-Duo MacBook Pro to the new machine. How do I do this?
    I noticed that the Apple Migration Assistant offered to copy the BootCamp volume, but I was unsure if this would simply be a folder on the HD rather than a separate Win XP bootable partition. Any thoughts? Thanks

    OK. Here is what happened. I have a Core-Duo MacBook Pro (machine #1) and a new Core-2-Duo MBP (machine #2). Both are running MacOS 10.5.1. I wanted to move my WinXP Bootcamp Partition (BCP), which is NTFS not FAT-32 as I stated previously, from the old machine to the new one. I am also running VMWare Fusion on #1.
    WinClone worked fine at creating an Image file in my Documents folder on the same drive. I then burned the .winclone image to DVD and then ran WinClone on #2 and Restored WinXP to the BCP on #2. Reboot into Bootcamp.
    Issues:
    1. Upon booting into WinXP, I would get to a screen where Windows said that needed to re-authorize WIndows. However, the mouse, trackpad and keyboard would not respond so I couldn't get past this dialogue. I tried rebooting several times, same result. I then inserted my MacOS 10.5 install DVD and I was able to get past this dialogue. Not sure if this was coincidence, but it worked.
    2. Had to reinstall Apple Drivers from MacOS 10.5 Install DVD. Bootcamp now worked.
    3. Booted back in to MacOS and launched VMWare Fusion. Got dialogue stating;
    "Cannot open disk '....../Boot Camp partition.vmdk' .....Reason: The partition table on the physical disk has changed since the disk was created. Remove the physical disk from the virtual machine, then add it again."
    Not sure how to do this. Any help? VMWare's site was not helpful. Thanks.
    Spelling errors edited by Mac MD.

  • Bootcamp partition appears empty to mac after restore...

    I recently chose to upgrade the HD in my 2007 macbook, in order to squeeze another year or 2 out of it. Setting up the mac part was no problem - just used superduper to copy the old disk to the new one while it was temporarily mounted in an external drive, then replaced the disk - worked perfectly.
    The bootcamp partition is another story. I did a bunch of research on how to best transfer my old windows 7 setup, and found the windows system backup and restore method was advised, and easy, so went with that method. Ran boot camp assistant, had it create the new ntfs partition the same as the old one, and ran the system restore from the windows setup disk, and it worked fine. Windows 7 works just as it once did, and I ran the bootcamp driver setup again just in case. Everything appears hunky dory on the windows side of things, and I can easily boot back into the mac os from it.
    So everything appears ok, but here's the problem - once I return to mac os, the bootcamp partition appears empty, and I don't have the option to boot to it via the Startup Disk in System Preferences, which is how I always used to boot to windows. I can still get into windows via the bootcamp assistant, but that's a really tedious affair that involves inserting the windows disk.
    Edit - I should add that I can also get into windows by using the option key during startup, that seems to work ok. But I still can't access the files in the bootcamp partition, which is a big problem - can this be fixed?
    Any ideas?
    Message was edited by: sduck409

    Thanks for the many ideas Hatter. I think you jogged my brain in the right direction. I tried the convert to ntfs thing, but the windows install already thinks it's ntfs. And since the disk is actually formatted as fat32, the fat is screwed up. I actually knew that thing about boot camp assistant only creating fat32 (once, a while ago), but forgot that detail in my hurry.
    So I ran bootcamp assistant, and deleted the bootcamp partition, with the idea of starting again. Ran bootcamp assistant again to restart the process, but this time it said Bootcamp assistant can not run - this disk is not supported. Hmmm. I had already inserted the windows disk and my windows backup volume.
    SO I figured I'd try restarting my computer; maybe that'd reinitialize the disk or something and bootcamp assistant would work. Hey, stranger things have worked in the past. But, for some reason the windows disk started up! And started copying files. I aborted it, but it was too late - it had somehow mangled my mac disk - it was now a empty fat32 disk - I had to reboot from the mac os x setup disk and run disk utility to find this out. So now I'm restoring from my time machine backup (I absolutely love time machine btw).
    The backup is going to take another 3 hours, so to get some stuff done I resurrected an old sony vaio win xp laptop that dates from 2000 I think. Holey moley, this thing is crappy.
    Anyway, thanks for the help. Once I get the machine back up and running, I'll try it again, and this time make sure the disk is actually ntfs before restoring to it.

  • BootCamp partition royally screwed up - blue screen in Windows, appears empty in OSX

    Howdy there,
    Well for over a year now I've been happily using BootCamp on my 2010 13in MacBook, first with XP and then 7 64bit. Then yesterday all of a sudden when I went to boot up in Windows, I got the blue screen of death and then a message telling me Windows files are missing. Rather than go through all Windows ******** restore hoops to get it working again, I figured I'd copy the important files to my Mac partition for safe keeping and wipe out BootCamp and start again, since I wanted to change the partition size anyways. However once booted in Mac, I found the BootCamp partition showed up empty, and I can't do anything with it in Disk Utility. When I click "restore files" in Windows, the C drive (BootCamp) doesn't even show up so I can't do anything to it in Windows.
    What on earth happened to it? I would really like to get my files back. I was using SL-NTFS to enable read/write on it. Could that have done something? I tried deleting it, but the BootCamp partition is still the same. Any insight would be greatly appreciated.

    One backup drive is not enough, minimal, maybe. One for Windows, a clone backup Mac, and TimeMachine.
    Consider a new backup drive with Lion installed, Lion Recovery and System partition, then 'shrink' the Lion partition to make room for backup volume.
    Lion Disk Utility can help edit, manage, inspect the health of all the hidden and user partitions.
    Check partition table health in Lion's Disk Utility
    Microsoft Security Essentials and IE9 offer good solid protection, no need but you may want to look into Kaspersky. But even KIS users seem to somehow manage to sometimes get their system infected. And there are tools to help. You will likely never know, unless you create a boot CD with malware removal tool and undo changes and repair the structure.
    Windows Easy Transfer can backup user files to NTFS partition. But that is an image, not individual files, so you need to restore using it again, similar to Migration Assistant.
    OS X Lion: About Windows Migration Assistant

  • Target Disk Mode: Searching files in Bootcamp partition

    I'm trying to search my Bootcamp partition via Spotlight or any search method
    1.  After I enter Target Disk Mode,  two "Y" drives show up on my desktop:  Bootcamp and Macintosh HD 320.
    2.  I click on the Bootcamp drive and try to do a search and nothing is displayed.
    3.  To trouble shoot, I click on the drive and enter a file name I can see is in Bootcamp, and still nothing shows up
    4.  I have tried going into spotlight and re-indexing the drive, but the Bootcamp drive is not recognized by spotlight.  Though the Mac 320 drive is.
    I don't care what proces I use to find the file, I just want to find the file.
    My logic board went out on me and I'm trying to access files to transfer onto the new machine.
    Thanks in advance for your help.
    Mac OS 10.7.5

    also, to clarify:  when I click on the partition, I can see the files listed.  I just cannot search.
    thanks again.

  • Success: moving bootcamp partition to an external drive

    Background
    Due to the relatively small, non-exchangable SSD on my Mac, I'd limited the bootcamp partition to 50GB when installing Windows. I needed to install new software in Windows, but was running out of space fast and didn't have the necessary space on the Windows side. I don't use Windows that often and for that reason, I wanted to move the Bootcamp partition to an external hard drive, freeing up space for the Mac side on the internal SSD. I'd read many conflicting reports on the web, some claiming they'd done it successfully, while others said it would be impossible, because Windows 7 wouldn't run from an external drive. I had a HDD in a USB 3 enclosure, and first tried to install Windows to this (using various guides on the web). I was very close to success with this USB 3 drive, but Windows would fail during start-up. Most reports claiming to have successfully been able to run Windows 7 from an external drive, had used Thunderbolt drives, so I decided to get myself a Lacie Rugged USB 3/Thunderbolt series Solid State Drive.
    Hardware used
    MacBook Pro 15" Retina Display (mid 2012), 2,3 GHz Intel Core i7, 8GB RAM, 250GB SSD
    Lacie Rugged USB 3/Thunderbolt series, 120GB Solid State Drive
    Software used
    Mac OS X Mavericks, 10.9.2
    Windows 7 Ultimate
    Plus several free downloads from the internet, see description below.
    Procedure
    Step 1: Get the Thunderbolt drive to work under your Bootcamp Windows 7 installation.
    This should be simple enough, but proved to be a little tricky. Here’s what I did (assumes you are running Mac OS X before you begin):
    1. Make sure your Thunderbolt drive is disconnected before proceeding.
    2. Restart your Mac and hold down the option key (alt key on some keyboards) during startup.
    3. Choose the Windows drive to start up Windows 7 on your Bootcamp partition.
    4. After log in to Windows 7, download the necessary driver software for your Thunderbolt drive (find it at the manufacturer’s homepage of your Thunderbolt drive - in my case lacie.com).
    5. If the downloaded driver installer is in a compressed format (like zip for example) be sure to decompress it before running the driver installer.
    6. Shut down your computer.
    7. Connect your Thunderbolt drive to your computer.
    8. Start up in Windows 7 (see items 2 & 3 above) and if it all went well, you should now be able to see your Thunderbolt drive under Start>Computer.
    Step 2: Format your Thunderbolt drive in NTFS-format.
    Still running Windows 7 with your Thunderbolt drive connected and visible to the system, it is now time to format your external Thunderbolt drive in NTFS-format. There are several ways of doing this. I used the procedure described here at tedhhack.co.uk.
    Step 3: Follow the directions at intowindows.com to clean install Windows 7 onto your external Thunderbolt drive.
    As described at intowindows.com, this involves downloading Windows Automated Installation Kit (WAIK) and running command line tools. At step 9 in the described process at intowindows.com, at the point where the installer asks if the drive you are installing to is a USB hard disk, the correct input is Y for yes, even if your external drive is a Thunderbolt drive (and obviously not a USB hard disk).
    At step 10 in the described process at intowindows.com (Reboot your PC), remember to hold down the option (or alt) key at every restart in the installation process, so as not to start up in Mac OS X. Also, since your machine now has two Windows 7 installations, Windows Boot Manager will appear and ask you to “Choose an operating system to start” and there is a list of two Windows.
    I don’t know how to tell which one is on the external drive and which one is on the internal drive at this point, but I started with the top one on the list and this turned out to be the one I wanted (the newly installed one on the external drive). If you pick the wrong one (on the internal drive) at first, simply restart the computer and choose the other one. You know you got the right one when the installation process continues and asks for further input.
    After the Windows installation is complete (there will be at least one other restart required - remember to hold down the option (alt) key to start up in Windows, and choose the same Windows on the list in the Windows Boot Manager), you’ll be running a freshly installed, but crippled Windows 7, as you still haven’t installed the specific drivers for your hardware. But don’t worry, that will be fixed in the next step.
    Step 4: Clone your Bootcamp partition from your internal drive to the external Thunderbolt drive.
    In this step you will copy all the software, drivers, settings and other files from your Bootcamp partition on your internal drive to your external Thunderbolt drive. The easiest way to do that is to clone your Windows partition - and to that end you’ll need to download some free software: AOMEI Backupper Standard 2.0 fits the bill perfectly, as it will let you clone at the same time as resizing the partition to fit your external Thunderbolt drive (I went from a 50GB internal Bootcamp partition to a 120GB external Thunderbolt SSD).
    1. Download  AOMEI Backupper Standard 2.0 (I used the 17MB download for Windows 7), install it, and run it.
    2. In the left column choose “Clone” and in the right column choose “Partition Clone”. By choosing Partition Clone instead of Disk clone, you won’t ruin the newly created (but invisible) boot partition on the external Thunderbolt drive.
    3. Press Next and choose your internal Bootcamp partition as the Source Disk.
    4. Press Next again and choose your external Thunderbolt drive (your newly installed Windows 7) as the Destination Disk.
    5. Press Next again and you’ll get a warning that you will erase the contents of the destination partition and it asks if this is what you really want to do. Press Yes to this question.
    6. Next screen is an Operation Summery. Toward the bottom of the Operation Summery screen there are a few interesting options: Edit Size of Partition, Clone Sector by Sector and Align Partition to Optimize for SSD.
    7. If your destination partition is larger than your source destination like mine was, press Edit Size of Partition. This will take you to another screen, where you can drag to resize the partition. I dragged this all the way to the right to give Windows 7 the full size of my external Thunderbolt drive.
    8. Leave the checkbox Clone Sector by Sector unchecked.
    9. If your external Thunderbolt drive is an SSD, put a check in the checkbox entitled Align Partition to Optimize for SSD.
    10. Now press the Start Clone button.
    11. When the cloning process is done, exit AOMEI Backupper and restart your computer (holding down the option or alt key) to start up in your new clone of your old Windows 7 with all the same software, drivers, settings and files.
    Step 5: Enjoy running all your Windows 7 applications from your external Thunderbolt drive!
    Step 6: Here is where I need help/advice – can I remove the Bootcamp partition on my internal drive now?
    I am reluctant to entirely remove the Bootcamp partition from my internal drive, as I am unsure whether this will disable me from starting up in Windows. I would love to hear from anyone here with insight on the matter.

    Step 6: Here is where I need help/advice – can I remove the Bootcamp partition on my internal drive now?
    To answer my own question in Step 6 above, no, or at least I haven't found a way yet...
    Here's what I've done so far:
    Used the Bootcamp Assistant to remove the bootcamp partition on my internal drive.
    Booted the system with the option (alt) key pressed down and now there was NO Windows drive to choose.
    Therefore I used the Bootcamp Assistant to install Windows back onto my internal drive (including installing Bootcamp drivers in the Windows environment). This time I chose the minimum partition of 20GB for the Windows installation on the internal drive.
    Booted into the new Windows on the internal drive and installed the drivers for my Thunderbolt drive.
    Restarted with the option (alt) key pressed down, chose the Windows drive, but Windows Boot Manager still didn't pop up to allow me to choose the Windows installation on the external Thunderbolt drive.
    Booted from the Windows DVD and chose Repair.
    Restarted with the option (alt) key pressed down, chose the Windows drive, and now Windows Boot Manager finally popped up, which allowed me to choose the Windows installation on the external Thunderbolt drive again, phew!
    So, I can run Windows 7 from the external Thunderbolt drive, but I have to use 20GB of my internal drive for a Windows installation I'll never use. Not the best solution, but at least I've saved 30GB of space compared to my previous Bootcamp partition - and I now have enough space to install the Windows 7 software I need on the external Thunderbolt drive...

  • Can I install Windows 8.1 as Bootcamp partition from OSX Mountain Lion using a USB stick?

    I have the following:
    Bootable USB stick with Windows 8.1 - 64 bit
    MacBook Pro with Mountain Lion 10.8.5 - it's probably 3-4 years old.
    The Bootcamp partition currently has Windows 7 installed.
    I want to know whether I can install Windows 8.1 from a USB stick into a Bootcamp partition. Apple's article on the topic refers to Bootcamp 5.1, but my OSX install has Bootcamp 5.0 - I am assuming 5.1 comes with the Mavericks version.  I don't want to upgrade to Mavericks because I am running out of space as it is on the OSX partition.
    Thus my question. So can I?

    Your laptop has a DVD drive, right? If so you need to burn your ISO to a disc, will not work off USB

  • Upgrading MacBook Pro Hard Drive - cannot get Bootcamp partition to work

    Hello,
    The other day, I decided to replace my 320 GB hard drive with a 1 TB hard drive/SSD hybrid. I did a little bit of research about cloning the drive before that, and it seemed pretty straight forward to clone the OS X partition, but I wasn't really sure about cloning my Windows partition. Originally, my 320 GB hard drive had 2 partitions: 220 GB for OS X Mavericks, and 100 GB for Windows 8.1.
    I bought the new drive with an external enclosure and plugged it in. The first thing I did was open Disk Utility and partitioned the new hard drive (750 GB HFS+, 250 GB NTFS). I figured I would need to partition it first and clone each partition separately. I used Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the OS X partition, and it worked with no problem (I immediately could restart my computer and boot with the partition on the new drive, while it was still plugged in by USB).
    Next, I tried using CCC to clone the Windows partition the same way (I realize now that CCC cannot do this). 7 hours later, the cloning was complete, but there was an error that a couple files couldn't be copied. I tried copying them manually but it didn't work. I wasn't sure if the Windows partition would work, so to find out, I switched the hard drives and put the old 320 GB one in the external enclosure. I booted my computer and it booted the new OS X partition with no problem. It also mounted the Windows partition that I cloned with CCC, and I can access all of the files in it. However, when I restarted and held down "option", it would not let me boot the Windows partition.
    After some googling, I realized CCC is not able to clone a bootcamp partition and make it bootable, so I opened disk utility and deleted the Windows partition (using the minus button), then recreated it (using the plus button). I downloaded Winclone (paid $30), which supposedly can clone a bootcamp partition. I opened Winclone and it seemed pretty simple: you just choose the source partition on the left, and the target on the right. I plugged in the USB enclosure with my old hard drive, and in the Winclone menu the original Windows partition popped up. I chose that as my source, and chose to copy it to the new NTFS partition on the new drive that I created. I left it on overnight, and when I woke up it said it was completed.
    I now had two drives mounted: my NTFS partition that I created, and a new one that said "EFI". I have no idea what EFI is. My NTFS partition looks like it has all of the files from my original Windows partition on it; however, when I restart it does not allow me to boot with it, although I now have the option to boot EFI. When I select EFI, I am given the Windows 8.1 start up screen (with the blue Windows logo), but then an error message pops up saying something like there is an issue and it needs to restart (it restarted before I could read the whole thing).
    When I boot in OS X, I only have the NTFS partition (with all my Windows files) mounted, and no EFI. When I restart, I can still boot EFI, but I always get the same message and then it restarts.
    Is there any way I can fix my Windows partition so that it works the same way it did on my old drive? What is EFI? Can I delete it? How can I make the NTFS partition, which seems to have all of my files, bootable? I only want 2 partitions: one for OS X, and one for Windows. Also, can I do all of this without having to reinstall either of the operating systems?
    Thanks

    Hmm, that's a good question!
    I headed over to the twocanoes website (the folks that make Winclone) and their guide mentions something about running Sysprep before you create the Windows image. If you skipped that step, that may be why you're having issues
    http://www.twocanoes.com/support/winclone/migrating-a-bootcamp-partition-with-wi nclone/
    Step 24 in that guide also mentions copying a Boot file - were you able to/did you do that?
    You may have better luck over in the Bootcamp forum, which is here.
    ~Lyssa

  • I have a Bootcamp partition on  my Imac with Mavericks which I can't delete because the Partition Layout is greyed out and is stuck on 'Current'. What can I do?

    I have a Bootcamp partition on my Imac with Mavericks which I can't delete because the Partition Layout in Disk Utility is greyed out and is stuck on 'Current'. What can I do? I was trying to install Windows 8.1 but apparently, this is not yet possible.
    I was originally able to restore to my original Mac OSX partition using Boot Camp Assistant but then after entering Disk Utility and re-RAIDing the default RAID 1 to RAID 0 in the BootCamp partition (I suspect this is the cause of the problem but why was it defaulted to RAID 1 in the first place?!!!!), forever afterwards, I couldn't restore the single OSX partition.
    Whenever I used BootCamp Assistant my choice to 'Install or remove Windows 7 or later version' was greyed out. Finally I went to Disk Utility to repartition but the Macintosh HD and BootCamp disk partition functions were also greyed out (even if I started up from Recovery mode holding down option, command and 'R' and choosing Disk Utility). BootCamp Assistant gives the error message 'The startup disk cannot be partitioned or restored to a single partition' with additional small script 'The startup disk must be formatted as a single Mac OS Extended (Journaled) volume or already partitioned by Boot Camp Assistant for installing Windows', and DU gives the error message 'The full size of the Fusion drive is not available for repartitioning'.
    What can I do to fix this problem? How can I make the Partition Layout button active in DU so I can change the partition to all OSX? I'm prepared to wipe off all my data etc to repartition and have backed up all to disk using Time Machine.

    My problem is fixed now, thank you. It was caused by my changing the Boot Camp partition's 'RAID1' to 'RAID0'. If I hadn't done that, Boot Camp would still have been able to 'restore' back to the one partition. It was fixed with the help of Applecare by using a terminal and typing a command to erase the IP of the Macintosh disk (not the volume) as well as the IP of the Bootcamp partition (if I remember correctly), but then I had to restore the OS and all my applications and data etc which I had previously backed up using Time Machine. I haven't taken note of the exact command terminology used. It would be wise to speak to Applecare about this if possible.
    Two words of warning, 1. According to the cause of this problem, it might be wise, after reinstalling the ops system to reinstall all extra applications one by one, manually, in case a similar problem arises again. Then manually copy back all data. Or the Mac user could use the Time Machine backup and then uninstall all the added apps then re-install them one by one manually. 2. Beware as after all this the user might not have the 'Recovery partition'. There is a small recovery partition (a few 100 Mb is size) which comes with all later Macs. After all this is done this tiny partition might not be there anymore and the user might have to re-install Mavericks again to get it back, or just install the upcoming update of Mavericks due in a month or so.

  • How can I restore Windows 7 to Bootcamp partition - not reformat the entire hard drive?

    Hello Apple (Mac) Community,
    I originally posted this question over on answers.microsoft, but no help was forthcoming. Hope someone can help me with a problem that's (almost) making me nuts! I teach graphics to college students. In brief: I run Windows 7 Pro 64 on a Mac Pro tower, along with Snow Leopard (OSX). Windows is loaded on one partition of a 1TB drive. The other partition is a Mac backup. The Mac OS is on a different drive. Everything was going swimmingly with both OS, until recently. Unfortunately, the drive with Windows showed problems and I determined that the HD was either toast or needed a total reformat. My Mac data was all backed-up. Now I wanted to backup Windows so I can easily get back to the relatively happy point of my Windows 7 experience (drivers loaded, dual monitors all working, etc.). I did some online searching and the recommendation was to create a "system image" of the existing Windows 7 install by attaching an external drive, formatting that to NTFS and selecting "backup to image" in Windows. I did that and also took the opportunity to "create a backup disc" on a DVD. (Windows recommended). Next I rebooted back to Mac OS and completely reformatted the problem 1TB disc to a single partition, zero all data, just to see if it would actually reformat. It all worked! So far, so good. Next I used Bootcamp to create two partitions, one for Windows. I then restarted using the Win7 Pro (64) install disc, reformatted the Bootcamp disk to NTFS (as required) and installed Windows 7. After all that is completed and all working, I next try to use the restore from image function while booted in Windows. I'm instructed to restart from the Win install disc, which I do. Here's where things get difficult. When I try to choose restore from image, at that point the installer asks which drives to I want to exclude... but does not show partitions, only full HDs. I do not want to reformat the entire 1TB drive. I only want Windows on the 120gb Bootcamp partition (which is already formatted for Windows BTW). I spent a lot of time online reading through articles with users having the same frustration.
    So here (at long last) is my question: How can I either restore Windows just to a Bootcamp partition... using "Windows System Image" or if that can't be done... can I somehow import all of the settings, etc. from the "image" (image is on external HD) into a fresh Win 7 install? So far the "backup disc" also seems useless. I can't even boot to Windows from it. BTW Apple folks: the only response on the MS side was that some "expert" simply posted links on how to install Windows and restore... not helpful with my particular problem of restoring to a partition.
    Any help would be appreciated! Hopefully some help that even a Mac user / new Windows user could understand would be better! Thanks!
    -melt

    WinClone 3 is OS X and saves Windows image it makes for restore - that should work but you will have to try and you would need to make a new image unless it also works with a native Windows system restore image. It is now supported and has come a long way.
    http://www.twocanoes.com/
    Paragon Clone OS works and does disk-to-disk clone just like CCC you end up with two bootable drives. But does not work with your setup. It would let you clone and move your Windows install to an SSD or another disk drive though and be bootable.
    During its clone process it checks for errors which is very helpful and lets you know - something CCC and others should adopt more of.
    http://www.paragon-software.com/downloads/demo.html
    I wish for our/my sake you had re-read and rewritten the long 'story' and broken it into a brief list of facts we needed.
    OS X
    Windows
    Backup (though external is much safer) and you want bootable OS X clones as well as TimeMachine
    https://support.apple.com/kb/HT1427
    https://support.apple.com/kb/HT1553
    There are a number of things to do like chkdsk and others as well as Windows DVD to do automatic system repairs and find out why.
    AppleHFS - the abilty to mount and read HFS volumes can be notorious.
    I would rearrange and redo your storage setup and how you use the 4-5 internal hard drive bays.

  • Upgrading MacBook Pro 13" (mid-2010) HDD with Bootcamp Partition

    I'm upgrading my macbook pro's hdd from 250 gb to 1tb. My OS is lion 10.7.5 and i also have windows 7 installed on my bootcamp partition.
    The following are the details to the HDD i plan to buy.
    Samsung Spinpoint M8 1 TB Laptop Internal Hard Drive (ST1000LM024) -
    2.5 inch Form Factor
    SATA 3.0 Gbps Interface
    1 TB HDD
    5400 RPM Spin Speed
    I need your advice on if i m buying the correct hard disk. If not please advice me one.
    And please also tell me how i should upgrade my hard disk. I know how to physically install the drive but i ask of you to tell me how to clone my current hard disk with my bootcamp partition. Which software to use, precautions to take etc.
    MacBookPro 13" (Mid-2010)
    Processor  2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
    Memory  8 GB 1067 MHz DDR3
    Graphics  NVIDIA GeForce 320M 256 MB
    Software  Mac OS X Lion 10.7.5 (11G63) and Windows 7 Ultimate on bootcamp

    Those are the correct RAM modules for you model (the 13" being the only mid-2010 model that can use 16GB of RAM - but those modules will surely get you to 8GB!).
    Am I right in assuming that you want to purchase a SSD to be installed in your boot bay and that you want to install the Samsung drive in the optical bay? Unfortunately, your link points to a rather sparse description of the drive - I see the 2.5" but I don't see the depth (which should be 7-9.5mm and not a mm more).
    I'm just unclear about whether you're looking for a new spinning drive as well as a SSD and whether or not the drive will fit (just a minute - OK, found some more info - the Samsung drive is 9.5mm so it should sit just fine in your machine: do you still want a SSD?).
    Note that the 2TB Samsung probably won't speed things up much - it's a 5400rpm drive: if you could use a 1TB drive, you could get a faster, 7200rpm drive.
    Clinton
    MacBook Pro (15” Late 2011), OS X 10.??, 16GB Crucial RAM, 960GB M500 Crucial SSD, 27” Apple Thunderbolt Display

  • VMware Fusion Performance: Bootcamp Partition or Virtual Machine?

    I'd like to run ArcGIS 9.3 in Windows XP using VMware Fusion. Can anyone comment on the virtues/drawbacks of using a bootcamp partition versus creating a VMware "Virtual Machine"?
    With bootcamp partition I can gradually increase the size of the partition as the partition becomes full using Drive Genius, correct?
    What about performance?
    Thanks!

    Visit MacTech.com and read their two benchmark reviews of Parallels, VM Fusion, and Boot Camp.
    You cannot "gradually increase the size" of a Boot Camp partition. To change the size you must first delete the existing partition then create a new, larger partition. Doing so will delete the entire Windows system, so be sure to back it up beforehand.

  • Recovering bootcamp partition - is there a solution that works?

    Dealing with bootcamp issues after a Lion upgrade seems to be a common problem with no agreed solution.
    When I upgraded my iMac to Lion, the upgrade process couldn't create a recovery partition so Apple support advised me to use Disk Utility to create a small (5 GB)  block of free space on my harddisk for the recovery partition to use and then to use Disk Utility to enlarge the OSX partition again to recover whatever remaining free space was left after the Lion upgrade had completed.
    This I duly did. However, after I enlarged the OSX partition using Disk Utility to recover the free space I found that a) the Bootcamp partition had been renamed "disk0s4" and b) when holding down the Option key when booting, the Recovery option was now labelled "EFI Boot" and appeared to boot from the regular OSX partition. Attempting to boot windows in Bootcamp results in a "missing operating system" error message.
    I'm not so worried about the recovery partition as I have a bootable DVD and USB flash drive.
    What I would like to do is recover some files from the Windows partition. There is a lot of opinions in the Apple suport forums about what works such as, booting Windows from the install disk and running the "fixmbr" and "fixboot" commands or using rEFIt or BootPicker (which doesn't seem to work on Lion).
    Is there a reliable approach to fixing this problem so that I can at least read the contents of the partition, even if I can't boot from it? If I can't actualy recover the partition I'm not too fussed, so long as I can get the data off it.
    Thanks...Macs

    Why do you suggest installing Lion on an external h/disk? Is this because of problems with Lion or just suggested standard procedure?
    Some of the options may work although I am unable to mount the partition at all (in OSX or by booting from a Linux live CD and trying to mount it from there) so I'm not sure how far any of them will get.
    I haven't tried booting from the Windows DVD as yet.
    If I run Verify on Disk Utility I get this:
    2012-03-20 22:18:41 +1100: Verifying volume “disk0s4”
    2012-03-20 22:18:41 +1100: Starting verification tool:
    2012-03-20 22:18:49 +1100: Checking file system2012-03-20 22:18:49 +1100: ** /dev/disk0s4
    2012-03-20 22:18:49 +1100: Invalid BS_jmpBoot in boot block: ba9a97
    2012-03-20 22:18:49 +1100: Error: This disk needs to be repaired. Click Repair Disk.
    2012-03-20 22:18:49 +1100:
    2012-03-20 22:18:49 +1100: Disk Utility stopped verifying “disk0s4”: This disk needs to be repaired. Click Repair Disk.
    Repair disk says this:
    2012-03-20 22:31:06 +1100: Verify and Repair volume “disk0s4”
    2012-03-20 22:31:06 +1100: Starting repair tool:
    2012-03-20 22:31:12 +1100: Checking file system2012-03-20 22:31:12 +1100: ** /dev/disk0s4
    2012-03-20 22:31:12 +1100: Invalid BS_jmpBoot in boot block: ba9a97
    2012-03-20 22:31:12 +1100: Volume repair complete.2012-03-20 22:31:12 +1100: Updating boot support partitions for the volume as required.
    2012-03-20 22:31:12 +1100: Error: Disk Utility can’t repair this disk. Back up as many of your files as possible, reformat the disk, and restore your backed-up files.
    2012-03-20 22:31:12 +1100:
    2012-03-20 22:31:12 +1100: Disk Utility stopped repairing “disk0s4”: Disk Utility can’t repair this disk. Back up as many of your files as possible, reformat the disk, and restore your backed-up files.
    I wondered whether the entry in the partition table had been completely screwed so I had a look with FDisk and GDisk.
    GDisk says this about the partition table:
    Disk /dev/disk0: 976773168 sectors, 465.8 GiB
    Logical sector size: 512 bytes
    Disk identifier (GUID): FB4FA8FD-D192-4589-93E1-A19A9F0F29D7
    Partition table holds up to 128 entries
    First usable sector is 34, last usable sector is 976773134
    Partitions will be aligned on 8-sector boundaries
    Total free space is 13 sectors (6.5 KiB)
    Number  Start (sector)    End (sector)  Size       Code  Name
       1              40          409639   200.0 MiB   EF00  EFI System Partition
       2          409640       869550263   414.4 GiB   AF00  Customer
       3       869550264       870727719   574.9 MiB   AB00  Recovery HD
       4       870727720       976773127   50.6 GiB    0700  Untitled
    And this about partition 4:
    Partition number (1-4): 4
    Partition GUID code: EBD0A0A2-B9E5-4433-87C0-68B6B72699C7 (Microsoft basic data)
    Partition unique GUID: 94C06328-9817-4012-9C30-C97592E671C1
    First sector: 870727720 (at 415.2 GiB)
    Last sector: 976773127 (at 465.8 GiB)
    Partition size: 106045408 sectors (50.6 GiB)
    Attribute flags: 0000000000000000
    Partition name: 'Untitled'
    For its part FDisk says:
    Disk: /dev/disk0     geometry: 60801/255/63 [976773168 sectors]
    Signature: 0xAA55
             Starting       Ending
    #: id  cyl  hd sec -  cyl  hd sec [     start -       size]
    1: EE 1023 254  63 - 1023 254  63 [         1 -     409639]  Unknown ID
    2: AF 1023 254  63 - 1023 254  63 [    409640 -  869140624] HFS+       
    3: AB 1023 254  63 - 1023 254  63 [ 869550264 -    1177456] Darwin Boot
    *4: 07 1023 254  63 - 1023 254  63 [ 870727720 -  106045408] HPFS/QNX/AUX
    From looking at the Fdisk and GDisk output I cannot see where the problem is occurring (although I know 2/5ths of stuff all about partition tables). I notice that the Bootcamp partition is now lacking a name although I don't know whether this matters or not and strangely FDisk identifies it as an HPFS filesystem whereas Disk Utility identifies it as MSDOS (FAT).

Maybe you are looking for