Clone a Mac Partition to an External Drive from within Windows 7 Bootcamp?

Anyone know if it is possible to clone the mac os x partition to an external drive from within Windows 7 bootcamp? I (like a few others) had a problem with the latest 10.6.3 update and I cannot boot into the mac partition but I can access it via bootcamp so I was thinking about trying to clone it to an external drive and then boot from the new clone and see if that works.
Appreciate your comments.

setup a 30GB partition on an external drive, along with a partition of 150% the size of your Mac OS X volume -- or larger.
Install OS X to 30GB.
While booted from DVD, before you install, you'll need to go to Utility Menu => Disk Utility to do the partitoning. While there, in DU see if you can repair your system.
And where is your TimeMachine or clone backup? The "Step #1: Backup before beginning your Boot Camp project."?
No way to backup or clone from within Windows, though you may be able to write to NTFS backup volume, UNLESS you bought MacDrive8 which allows read AND write to HFS+ from within Windows.

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Can't save multiple folders to external drive. Get: "The operation can't be completed because you don't have permission to access some of the items." when dragging large folders to mac os extended journalled external drive from OS 10.6.8

Hi
I am feeling VERY desperate!
After losing an external drive [dont ask....] -   I got another one : 2TB WD formatted properly [ OS extended journalled for mac ] ready for action to move my thousands of files and images and ppts in hundreds of folders across from the laptop to this drive because I travel a bit with the laptop and this is too risky not to back up at home.
But this message came up after starting on moving folders across [** and not straight away, sometimes after moving a folder when 4 of 6 gb of files across then the message comes up = very frustrating]:
"The operation can’t be completed because you don't have permission to access some of the items."
I am dragging mixed sometimes large complex folders to this os extended journalled external drive from my mac book pro OS 10.6.8 - it would take decades to move items one by one or even folder by folder and really confusing.
I have dragged-copied various small folders and files across successfully, but it is only working 50:50 and I can't leave machine with the idea of things copying eg: overnight - it just won't work....
I have been browsing google and find some people describing in CODE how they overcome this 'message'   .... but I [and I guess some other viewers of this in future & also in desperation] would need instructions for beginners.... to try this type of thing. I don't know any code.
How can this be happening - I feel ANGRY at APPLE !!!! for not posting easy fix instructions yet re; this, or better still updating software so it doesn't happen [ that I can find at least !!! ] .   There seem to be hundreds of people stuck with this stupid message and inability to back up their projects etc.
Can anyone help ?
Many thanks
Julie
15 August 2011

hi Samberl
thanks a lot for the fast reply.
I was dragging folders from main folders on the laptop-desktop onto the external drive icon - to copy them across....
Your suggestion sounds very promising - I didn't know about 'cloning'.
Yes the idea is to backup the laptop -    I thought I would just move it all now, new - and then keep saving/dragging physically   across to the new drive myself each day or two...
Would this be the sizeof the internal hard drive = c.500 gb ?   =   under the HD icon on desktop is written :
" 499.76gb , 311.5 gb free "
I can erase and start agin on the new external drive - so this plan is to make two partititions, rather than the one at present, and make one of them 500 gb ?
I have found CCC [carbon copy cloner] googling - looks good.
When CCC site says it backs up the hard drive - would this mean all my files [over 100 gb] that are mostly in folders on the desktop, plus the others in itunes, iphotos etc found in the HD icon, would all copy across successfully [wherever they are in the computer ] ?
thanks again, hope you can clarify these things and then I will go for it.
It would be great and amazing if this 'lack of permission' message doesn't show up in the process of doing this ccc transfer - hopeful!
Julie

If I partitioned my drive from within a bootcamped windows volume will it destroy my GPT scheme and disable my booting ability into Mac OSx?

Alright I consider myself a fairly computer literate person but do excuse me if this issue is not actually all that interesting. Know that I would call apple care but what I am trying to do isn't exactly supported by them so they wouldn't help me. I am setting up my system to triple boot. I did the normal method as far as I can tell. I used bootcamp assistant to shrink my drive and installed windows through that. All went well. So then I had a apprx 400gb mac os volume and a 100gb windows volume. Following the advice from the mactel team over at the ubuntu help site I logged into windows via startup+option. When I did this all volumes popped up. recovery mac and windows. selected windows and then used the windows disk utility equivalent to shrink that partition in half. When I did this I check the disk manager and all was well. all volumes were there and healthy. When I restarted my computer in the boot manager window though only the recovery boot and the windows boot showed up. After doing a little research I figured that the error was negligible and that I could fix it easily enough later so I proceeded to then format the free space volume into an ntfs for the ubuntu setup. When I did that and restarted only the windows boot shows up in the boot menu. When I look through disk manager all of the partitions are where they should be and healthy. The only real clue I've found is that when inside of bootcamp control panel instead of the different volumes showing up as they are normally supposed to it gives me the option of startup from the windows volume the ntfs volume and a pseudo volume that doesnt physically exist that serves the purpose of windows recovery. This makes me think something went wrong with bootcamp. I would rEFIt it and try to see if theres some magic I could work in there but I can't install that program on windows. Additionally I found out that theres some talk that ssd can only handle two bootable partitions and that perhaps when I added a partition it shifted priority to volumes 2 and 3 instead of 1 and 2. I've tried all of the bootup tricks i know and some I looked up. the only one that still works is the boot manager window. The rest just do nothing and then go straight to windows which makes me thing if something happened with bootcamp that all the very low level osx to setup and then run windows on top of that- that now the operation isn't running as planned and windows is actually touching the hardware thus subverting any attempts to use low level osx tricks to get around it. Anyway those are the facts and my thoughts.
Having done more research than when I originally wrote ^^ I now realize that the entire reason for bootcamp (sans driver issues) is to deal with the difference between the use of GPT and MBR. I am now pretty sure that rewriting any part of the drive from software that uses MBR will mess up the partition scheme of the entire drive. Additionally I've seen a few things about ssd's being weird when they have too many partitions on them. And lastly I have an iso image of my computer right before I started tinkering so if anything I can factory reset and voila(I don't feel like pulling up a french keyboard).
picture from disk manager in windows

I actually managed to get the setup running and relatively stable. There were alot of random issues and quite honestly I was fixing my computer more often that I was using it so I backed out. If anyone wants to do this like I did I would say: It's not easy and definitely not for someone who doesn't know anything about the differences between operating systems and partitioning schemes. That being said I didn't know nearly enough and if you're careful its possible. The steps however aer pretty simple.
Before doing anything get a third party boot handle up and stable on your machine.
1. Create a partition for Windows
2. Create a partition for Linux
3. Bootcamp Windows. This step can be tricky with the extra partition because bootcamp tries to handle all of it for you so it may benefit some people to bootcamp first and then create a linux partition. But that comes with its own set of issues.
4. Run Linux setup from inside of osX NOT windows.
There are a hundred steps that could come between each of those and I neither have the expertise nor the balls to empower someone who needs to read a forum post how to do it. But it really wasn't more conceptually complicated than that.
Now on to the new issue. I was getting .NET framework incompatibilities and the whole reason I wanted the windows setup was to game so I deleted that partition. When I did that everything went back to normal EXCEPT somewhere somehow the windows boot manager is still buried and when I boot up it tries to boot into windows which obviously doesnt exist anymore. Any advise on how to get rid of this?
to make things clear I'm now running "single" partition.
@Allen Eckert

How to access external drives while in Windows

Using VMWare Fusion as the system hosting Windows XP. Have specific programs in Windows only but of course they work much better on the IMac. I edit a ton of video and have the vids all stored on eternal drives. These drives are read by the Mac and all show up on the desktop and are accessible for all Mac programs.
Here's the issue. I need to access those external drives from a Windows video editing program being run thru Fusion. The Windows program is accessing a folder via "Shared folder on host" but the only folders showing up there are the ones listed under "Home" om "My Places". I'm sure this is nothing more than a setting but I am in need of help! All my editing is held up at the moment so any assistance is greatly appreciated for this Apple rookie. Thanks.

I don't have my laptop with fusion loaded, so I can't think of the exact terms. However, you should be able to set the shared folders in the settings for the virtual machine. The ones you see are the default setup, but you can define more paths to view while in Fusion.

Best way to set up partitions on 250GB external drive

Hi all,
I've decided to go with an Iomega eGo 250-GB FireWire portable drive to back up my iBook's hard disk (30 GB) plus to store my photos and maybe hold a bootable copy of OS9.
This is my first time using an external drive, so I don't really know how to go about setting things up.
What would be the best way to set up the partitions on the external drive?
1) I know I should create a 30GB partition for the iBook backup, but what about for the remaining volume? Is it best to leave it as a single large 200GB partition, or split it into two 100GB chunks? Other than the clone of my iBook, I'll mainly be storing photos (at the moment no more than around 10-12GB).
2) I don't yet have a huge iTunes collection, but if I later want to store iTunes music that doesn't fit on my internal drive, is it fine to put it in the same partition as the photos, or would it be preferable to create a separate partition?
3) If I want to install OS9 on the drive, how much space should I allot to it? Would this enable me to run legacy apps on my iBook?
4) Does it matter how I name the partitions (i.e. should the name for my iBook back-up be the same as the original volume or should it be different?)
5) As I still don't know exactly what I need, If today I decide to create only 30GB partition to backup the iBook, can I later partition the remaining space without having to start all over again?
6) Also, the drive came out of the box with Mac OS Extended format. Is this the best format or is there another that would be better?
Thanks for any advice
Message was edited by: Lutetia

1) I know I should create a 30GB partition for the iBook backup, but what about for the remaining volume? Is it best to leave it as a single large 200GB partition, or split it into two 100GB chunks? Other than the clone of my iBook, I'll mainly be storing photos (at the moment no more than around 10-12GB).
2) I don't yet have a huge iTunes collection, but if I later want to store iTunes music that doesn't fit on my internal drive, is it fine to put it in the same partition as the photos, or would it be preferable to create a separate partition?
The answer to both question is that it's completely up to you. Partitioning or not partitioning won't affect operation significantly.
3) If I want to install OS9 on the drive, how much space should I allot to it? Would this enable me to run legacy apps on my iBook?
The iBook G4 can not boot from OS 9 so you would only be able to run OS 9 in the "classic" environment.
4) Does it matter how I name the partitions (i.e. should the name for my iBook back-up be the same as the original volume or should it be different?)
No
5) As I still don't know exactly what I need, If today I decide to create only 30GB partition to backup the iBook, can I later partition the remaining space without having to start all over again?
There are a few tools which promise the ability to change the partitioning without destroying the data on the drive. But you should never do this without making a backup of the data on the drive. Data loss can easily happen and in a big way.
6) Also, the drive came out of the box with Mac OS Extended format. Is this the best format or is there another that would be better?
That is the best format.

Using Disk Utility to create a partition on an external drive

Hi Everyone
I have a 250gb external HD drive which is currently split into two partitions of Fat32. I'd like to use this drive for storing images of OS X, but when I tried to create an image using the OS X startup DVD, I was told that FAT32 didn't allow large enough file sizes (or something along those lines) in order for me to backup my OS X.
Disk Utility appears to offer the ability to split partitions on the external drive, i.e. I can select the largest of the two partitions and choose to split it into two 96gb partitions. However, will this be a destructive partition process, and can I reasonably expect my external hard disk to be reformatted with a 96gb Mac OS X formatted partition whilst still keeping two FAT32 partitions and all the data that resides on them?
Any help is much appreciated!

You will not be splitting existing partitions. Instead, you will be creating a new partitions from scratch.
Run Disk Utility. Select the hard drive to be partitioned. Make sure you select the hard drive in the sidebar, not the volume indented below the drive. Go to the Partition tab. If you want one or more of the partitions to be MS-DOS, you must first click on the Options... button. Select the Master Boot Record option and OK. Select Volume Scheme of 3 Partitions. Now set up your three new partitions as you want them, in terms of size and format. For the Mac partition, select Mac OS Extended (Journaled) as the format.

Can i have my windows partition on an external drive?

hello all,
alright, so im looking at a laptop for college and after much research and a few trips to the apple store i want the new, 13-inch macbook pro, with retina display and a 256GB flash hard drive. i love this computer in every aspect except.... you guessed it, its small hard drive. i can always get external drives to make up the differance though, and their is always the cloud so i dont think ill have too much of a problem. but i do need to use some software for college that is only windows based. so rather then splitting up this already small hard drive can i just install windows onto my mac (because i already know i cant put windows on an external drive with boot camp) and make the entire windows partition on the external drive? this way im not losing any native space besides that used to hold windows and im not installing windows to an external drive so hopefully bootcamp wont have a hissey fit. can anyone tell me if this will work? or if this wont work can anyone give me any other solutions to having windows on my mac without splitting up my native hard drive? such as installing windows to my mac and making the partition in the cloud or something? just anything so i dont have to split my already small, yet extremally fast, 256GB hard drive.

You can install Windows on your internal drive and store your Windows data on any drive you want to use. Keep in mind that any Windows programs you install in Windows will be installed on your internal drive. So make the Boot Camp partition large enough for Windows and any programs you may install now or in the future. You will also need room for swap/page files and other activities such as installing Windows updates.
100GB will likely be a good size for the Boot Camp partition given that it is unknown what programs you will be installing.

Reformat external drive from mac os to windows

the windows partition on my mac book pro is close to full.
i would like to use an external drive formatted for windows for my growing number of pc games (gw,tdu,fsx,dirt - which run great on the mac book pro windows partition btw).
i tried to reformat a mac formatted external drive using disc utility, erase, format volume, but only choices were mac os extended and unix - no fat32, dos, or windows choices.
if i start up my mac book pro using windows, the drive does not show up in the 'hard drives' section of 'my computer'
please let me know how to reformat this mac formatted external drive so i can use it when the mac book pro is running windows.
thanks

Hi Stefan, Turns out my old ext hd was corrupt. Bought a new 300G G-Drive and got a brand new problem which you may have heard of - the dreaded hal.dll crash. My windows partition crashed and after much effort I finally have everything working.
Had to go to the mac store to get a boot camp 1.4 disk (mine was the original) was able to save files from the corrupt windows partition to my mac partition. next i used boot camp to revert to a single partition on my internal drive, saving my mac system and files. next used boot camp to partition the internal drive into big mac and 31G windows. reinstalled windows. next using disk utility i split my 300G external into 10 30G partitions using your GUID suggestion and formatting in ms-dos(fat32) so my mac could read/write to it. dragged the files i saved to the 30G partitions and they work fine. loaded more games into the 30G partitions and they also are working fine.
could not have done it without your pointing out the GUID option.
vielen dank, john

I am trying to back up a Mavericks partition to a partition on my external drive.

I am trying to back up a Mavericks partition to a partition on my external drive. I have erased the partition on the external drive but I keep getting an error message that the back up drive is full. I also have Snow Leopard backed up to the other partition on the external drive. When I first tried this, Time Machine tried to back up the entire MacBook Pro drive on the same external drive partition. It's as if it doesn't recognize the Mavericks partition on the Mac drive. Also, I can't delete the empty partition on the miniStack external drive.
Any help will be appreciated. Thanks!
Gerald
2009 MacBook Pro, 10.9.2, 2.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo

Are you trying to backup to an external HD connected to your computer, or a wireless HD interfaced to an iPad?
Mac - How to Move the iPhone & iPad iTunes Backup folder to an External Hard Drive
http://osxdaily.com/2011/03/05/how-to-move-the-iphoneipad-itunes-backup-folder-t o-an-external-hard-drive/
How to Change the Location of Your iPhone Backup (Mac)
http://ismashphone.com/2012/05/how-to-change-the-location-of-your-iphone-backup. html
Windows - Change iPad default backup location
http://apple-ipad-tablet-help.blogspot.com/2010/07/change-ipad-default-backup-lo cation.html
Windows - Changing IPhone and iPad backup location
http://goodstuff2share.wordpress.com/2011/05/22/changing-iphone-and-ipad-backup- location/
 Cheers, Tom

I have an existing mini mac and 4 tb external drive. My iTunes library exists on the external drive under /itunes... I have purchased a new mini mac and I want to leave the library where it is but move to new mini mac.. what do i need to do ?

I have an existing mini mac and 4 tb external drive.
My iTunes library exists on the external drive under /itunes...
I have purchased a new mini mac and I want to leave the library where it is on the external drive but move to new mini mac and have it show as it did on the old mini mac..
what do i need to do ?
I have found multitude of articles about moving itunes to external drive or other similar things but I don't want to move itunes from the external drive, just change mini mac machines and have everything in itunes the same..
Thanks

I had already tried that one and got this...
below is screen shot of what is on the new mac mini
and what is on the external drive now connected to the new mac mini..
There are no media files on the mac mini just the library files and on external just media files..
Do I need to copy anything over from the old mac mini ? xml files ? .. the itunes folder on old mini is about 840mb in size which looks to have artwork ect ? .. I am fairly computer literate, but this one has me stumped.. ?
thanks for help

Using Time Capsule to back up Mac Book Pro and external drive

we're changing our main computer in the house to our mac book pro, which is not currently backed up, so i'm thinking of buying a time capsule. our current main machine is an old pc with two external hard drives connected....one used as the main file storage location and the second as a back up location. the main large files on these drivers are photo's, videos and scanned documents. can i use the time capsule to back up the mac book with an external hard drive connected to it? i'm thinking of leaving all the photo's, videos, documents, etc. on the external harddrive but want to be able to back it up to the time capsule as well as backing up the mac book pro. can backing up the external hard drive be set up to activate automatically daily as I think the mac book can? thanks

This is not as simple as it could be..
Firstly the Mac can read the external drives via the PC if they are shared to the network.. it cannot read them directly plugged into the Mac or the TC.
Also the TC is not really designed to store files.. it is a location for backups by TM..
Read some of the stuff Pondini.. our local Time Machine expert.
http://pondini.org/TM/FAQ.html
Q3 here is relevant. http://pondini.org/TM/Time_Capsule.html
The hard drives would have to be plugged directly into the Mac to be backed up and they would have to be reformatted to Mac format. So you would need to offload the files.. format and then load the files back.. no trivial task.

Can't boot from Windows partition or any external drives...?

My iMac just stopped booting from both my boot camp partition, and any external drives. I tried booting from a bootable flashdrive with drive genius installed, but it just booted OS X. Despite holding TAB, it just boots normally, as if I wasnt even holding it. I also tried installing rEFit, but OS X still ignores it and just boots normally. What's going on?!

...wow....nevermind, i just realized that i was hitting tab not option...good lord...ive been running boot camp for a long time too...alright well...thanks anyway lol

How can I mount a Raid set (partition in an external drive)?

Hi,
I have 3 partitions in my external drive. I tried to create a concatenated Raid from 2 of the partitions. However, I end up with an offline Raid Slice (one of the partitions is under this slice) which is grayed out in Disk Utility.
When I try to delete the Raid Set, I get "Deleting RAID set failed. This RAID configuration is not valid" warning. When I try to erase the RAID volume, I get "Volume Erase failed with the error:The chosen size is not valid for the chosen filesystem." warning. I cannot mount the volume either.
So, I have 2 of the 3 partitions mounted. The 3rd partition (which is under RAID) is unmounted. Do you have any suggestions to have access to the 3rd partition?
Thanks.

Why are you trying to RAID two partitions on the same drive? Aside from the fact that it doesn't work it also makes no sense when you can simply create a larger partition by joining the two into one.

HT5446 If I buy a mac mini with a fusion drive and add windows using boot camp, can I make the SSD function be dedicated to the windows partition?

If I buy a mac mini with a fusion drive and add windows using boot camp, can I make the SSD function be dedicated to the windows partition?

Additional information from Linc's post. Basically, only one additional partition can be added to a Fusion Drive and it resides on the HDD.
Do computers that come with a Fusion Drive support Boot Camp?
Yes. Use the Boot Camp Assistant to create a Windows partition and install Boot Camp. The Windows partition will exist on the hard disk drive, not the Flash drive, and is not part of Fusion Drive Logical Volume Group. 3TB Fusion Drive configurations need to update to OS X Mountain Lion v10.8.3 or later to install Windows 8. See iMac (27-inch, Late 2012): Boot Camp alert with 3T hard drive for more information.

Can I install os9 on an external drive from mavericks

Can I install OS9 on an external drive from Mavericks? I'm running Mavericks 10.9.4 on both my MBP and 27" iMac. I have my original OS9 install disc. I'd like to install OS9 on an external drive so I can use some classic apps that I'd like to use.
I tried to install directly to an external drive, but when I click on the Mac OS Install icon, I get the message "You can't open the application "%@" because it may be damaged or incomplete." The icon for Mac OS Install is the generic page with an A. Figuring that Mavericks doesn't recognize the app. Then I restarted and held down the C key - no luck.

I understand, but was hoping I boot off an external drive in 9. Thanks for your response and I apologize for my late response.

Clone a Mac Partition to an External Drive from within Windows 7 Bootcamp?

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