Monday, I wrote about the process of upgrading the hard disk on my Apple MacBook Pro, and the as-yet unsolved problem of migrating the 20GB Boot Camp partition on the old hard disk--along with its Windows Vista installation--to a 32GB partition on the new drive. (See "Another new hard disk...and an unsolved problem.")
Well, it's all working now. As I've always said about the Mac, most things are either easy or impossible...and this one turned out to be easy.
My thanks to my friend EDN senior technical editor Brian Dipert who provided half of the solution, and also to CNET member rob66778, who apparently signed up for a CNET account just so he could tell me about the other half. That was very kind of him!
Rob66778's contribution, in the comments to my post Monday, was to tell me about a program called WinClone, which can copy Boot Camp partitions to a disk-image file and then copy from the image to a different Boot Camp partition.
Equipped with this tool, I was able to wipe out the Boot Camp partition I'd previously created, use Boot Camp to create another one of the same size, and copy the Boot Camp partition from the old disk to the new one.
But I wanted a larger Boot Camp partition. I think now I could have just created a larger partition to begin with and WinClone would have handled it correctly, but I had tried that before--using a different tool to copy the partition data--and it didn't work.
So to be safe, I had WinClone make the exact copy, and used the program Brian suggested-- Paragon's CampTune-- to expand the Boot Camp partition to the size I wanted.
CampTune comes as an .iso file that is used to create a bootable CD just for this purpose. I burned the disc, booted from it, and everything worked perfectly for me. CampTune is currently "pre-release" software, though, so make sure you make reliable backups first.
At that point I was able to boot Vista from the Boot Camp partition, and when I rebooted into Mac OS X, I was able to run Parallels Desktop to bring up the same copy of Vista in a virtual machine.
So all is well, and I'm documenting the process here for the next person who needs to get this done.
I'll also second the comment on my previous post from CNET user Mr. Dee , who said that Apple's Time Machine software ought to take care of backing up and restoring Boot Camp partitions, since Apple is responsible for creating those partitions in the first place.
Please leave a comment if you try this process yourself, especially if you can confirm that WinClone can do the whole thing in one step. Thanks!
I bought my 2.33GHz MacBook Pro about two years ago, shortly after it was introduced. It came with a 160GB hard disk, but that wasn't really enough for all my stuff, particularly when I wanted to add a Boot Camp partition for Microsoft's Windows Vista.
So last July, I upgraded to a 250GB drive, a process I described here ("A new hard disk for my MacBook Pro").
Samsung's Spinpoint M6 500GB mobile hard disk
(Credit: Samsung)That drive started feeling a little tight within just a few months, chiefly due to videos downloaded from the iTunes Store. Although I rarely buy videos from iTunes, there's a lot of free stuff there. I have a particular weakness for video podcasts about automobiles, such as VOD Cars and BMW's own video magazine, BMW-web.tv. Oh, and I've also lost some potential productivity to the Onion News Network video feed and the original Onion Radio News, which are also available through iTunes.
I hung tight through the 320GB generation of laptop hard disks, figuring that wasn't enough of a capacity improvement to justify the cost.
But shortly after Samsung started shipping the Spinpoint M6 model HM500LI, Montalvo Systems shut down, and I had other things to think about than upgrading my hard disk. I decided to wait for Hitachi or Western Digital to introduce a competing model, so I could make sure I was getting the best product when the time came.
Hitachi has a 500GB drive, but at 12.5mm thick, it won't fit in the MacBook Pro. Then Western Digital introduced the new Scorpio Blue, a 9.5mm drive with specifications pretty much identical to those of the Samsung drive. I was able to get a pretty good deal on the Samsung drive, so that's what I decided to go with.
I went through the same upgrade process I used last time, which I recommend to anyone upgrading a hard disk: back up the old disk to the new disk in an external enclosure before swapping in the new drive. With a Mac, it's easiest to do the backup by connecting both drives to another machine using the special feature called FireWire Target Disk Mode.
In this case, I only backed up the Mac partition this way, since Macs can't natively write to NTFS partitions; I used Windows to back itself up separately to a different drive.
After going through the usual grief involved in upgrading a MacBook Pro hard disk-- which I don't recommend to anyone who isn't very familiar with safe maintenance procedures for modern laptops-- everything just worked. The new drive is fast, silent, and huge, everything I love in a hard disk.
Well, all but one thing. The Boot Camp partition isn't so easy to migrate over. After booting from the new drive, I let the Boot Camp Assistant program create a new Boot Camp partition with an NTFS filesystem, then used Mike Bombich's NetRestore application to copy the old data to the new partition.
But although the copy proceeded normally and the new partition received all the files from the old one, it also received the old partition's size-- 20GB instead of the 32GB I had allocated for it. And it didn't come out bootable, nor would Parallels Workstation work with it, in spite of being configured to use the Boot Camp partition on the old drive.
I can't find anything online about migrating a Boot Camp partition when upgrading a hard disk. So let me ask all of you folks: does anyone know how to do this?
I'll post an update here when I get it figured out. In any event, I can always just wipe out the new partition and reinstall Windows...
Update: now solved! See my followup post: "Migrating and resizing a Boot Camp partition". Thanks to everyone who commented.
When I got this MacBook Pro (MBP), with its 2.33GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, back in November, one of the reasons for upgrading was the availability of Parallels Desktop 2.5. The Parallels software runs Microsoft's Windows XP or Vista in a virtual-machine environment. You get the Windows desktop in a window on your Mac desktop, so both environments are available at the same time. The Windows hard disk can be created as a file in your Mac filesystem, so you don't waste much disk space.
There's also Apple's own Boot Camp, which lets you boot into Mac OS X or Windows, but not both. Windows installs in its own partition, so you have to set aside as much disk space as you think you'll ever use in Windows. The biggest Boot Camp advantage is that with Windows in full control of the machine, it has access to the MBP's AMD Radeon X1600 3D graphics chip. In Parallels 2.5, Windows thinks it's using a simple-minded 2D graphics chip.
When I got the machine, I set up both Parallels and Boot Camp just to give them a try. Yes, I had two complete copies of Windows XP installed on my Mac. Both setups worked well enough for me-- mostly because I don't tend to play Mac or PC games-- so I decided to wipe out the Boot Camp partition and just use the Parallels configuration.
But last month, Parallels released version 3.0 of the Desktop software, which added some really good features, including 3D graphics support, Vista support, free-floating Vista application windows on the Mac desktop, and the ability to share the Boot Camp partition. But by the time Parallels Desktop 3.0 shipped, I no longer had enough free space on my hard drive to recreate the Boot Camp partition.
So when I upgraded my hard disk last weekend, I set aside some free space and planned to upgrade to Parallels 3.0 and install Vista on a Boot Camp partition.
After about three hours of effort Tuesday evening, I'm up and running. Setting aside the free space when I partitioned the new drive turned out to be counterproductive. Apple's Boot Camp Assistant software had no idea what to do with it. I had to use Apple's diskutil program from the command line to expand my Mac OS X partition to use the whole drive, then use Boot Camp Assistant to split off the new Vista partition.
After that, it was just a matter of using Boot Camp to install and configure Vista, then rebooting into Mac OS X to tell Parallels that the Vista partition was available. I ran into no major problems, just a few minor glitches that were easily solved. Yesterday I installed Office 2007 and Visio. Everything's working great. Highly recommended!
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