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've been using an Apple MacBook Pro for a little over a year now, and I'm pretty happy with it.
Apple's new Mac OS X Leopard
(Credit: Courtesy of Apple)I didn't immediately upgrade to Leopard, the new version of Mac OS X, when it shipped back in November for reasons I discussed here, but last weekend I decided to go for it.
There's a new update coming to version 10.5.2, which according to a release note available to Apple developers includes a raft of bug fixes, but I wanted to upgrade to Microsoft Office for Mac 2008 as soon as possible, so I figured I'd just go ahead and upgrade OS X at the same time. (I'll probably post a review of Office 2008 sometime soon.)
The OS upgrade process appeared to go well, but when I tried to log in, Leopard said it wasn't able to access my home folder. I use Apple's FileVault security technology, which stores my home folder in a virtual disk image that is encrypted using the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES). FileVault protects my data if the machine is stolen, and I regard it as an indispensable feature of Mac OS X.
Unfortunately, Leopard wasn't happy with the disk image for my home folder, and simply refused to open it.
I wasn't expecting this problem, but I was prepared for it. I made a backup of the machine just before starting the upgrade, and I also maintain a secondary user account without FileVault in case of problems with the primary account. I logged into that other account and discovered on the Web that other people have seen exactly the same problem.
Apple published a tech note suggesting that this problem is related to passwords of 8 or more characters-- my passwords are all a lot longer than that, and so should yours be!-- but the complex procedure described in the note for solving the problem didn't help me.
Ultimately I had to delete and recreate my primary account then copy my files from the disk image into the new home folder. It turns out I'd have wanted to do this anyway, since Leopard introduces a new approach to FileVault that works better with Time Machine, Apple's new backup program.
Everything worked properly when I was done, but this was a slow, awkward procedure that most ordinary users would never have been able to handle. I just wish the Leopard installer had checked for this condition and done all the necessary work directly.
With Leopard running at last, I was able to get Office 2008 installed, and I'm slowly working through a number of small issues-- learning how to work around a minor bug in the new version of Apple's Mail program, upgrading some third-party software I use, etc.-- but generally I'm happy with the upgrade. Leopard seems a little faster overall, and Time Machine is great. It gives me a lot of confidence that my data is better protected against software and hardware failures.
I'm also making periodic complete backups in case I get bitten by any major new bugs in Leopard or Time Machine, but I don't expect anything like that.
I may have additional comments, especially after the 10.5.2 update... stay tuned!
I didn't attend the Apple event yesterday, but I watched the liveblogging by Tom Krazit here on CNET and by Ryan Block on Engadget. Not the same as being there, but still fun.
As everyone knows by now, Apple introduced three completely new iPods along with minor updates for the iPod Shuffle and iPhone:
- iPod pico: Earbud players sold in ... Read more
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