BootCamp on the Mac

[jwolf6589]

I just purchased a 500GB hard drive and had my previous drive cloned over to my Macbook. BootCamp was copied over as a folder. To get BootCamp running again on the new drive do I need to go through the hassle of setting it up again or can I just create a Windows partition and copy the folder over to that drive? Previous partition was 30GB as FAT32 to complicate things.


John

 

[johnhurley]

I just purchased a 500GB hard drive and had my previous drive cloned over to my Macbook. BootCamp was copied over as a folder. To get BootCamp running again on the new drive do I need to go through the hassle of setting it up again or can I just create a Windows partition and copy the folder over to that drive?

It will not work just copying as a folder ... there are boot loader sections and special partition stuff that need to go in thru the installer.

There are a bunch of threads here about using a tool called win clone to do it. Cleanest way ( and easiest but not necessarily shortest way ) is to do all the setup again on the new drive using the bootcamp assistant.

 

[balamw]

Cleanest way ( and easiest but not necessarily shortest way ) is to do all the setup again on the new drive using the bootcamp assistant.

I concur.

Unfortunately Winclone is abandonware. It still works, but I no longer recommend it for folks who don't otherwise already know what they are doing.

Once you have a new install you can use the folder you created to move data files back.

B

 

[jwolf6589]

I concur.

Unfortunately Winclone is abandonware. It still works, but I no longer recommend it for folks who don't otherwise already know what they are doing.

Once you have a new install you can use the folder you created to move data files back.

B

Okay I have a Windows partition but have not run the setup to install Windows. I was hoping I could just drag and drop the Bootcamp folder to the drive like how I did things in the Mac OS 7-9 days but it wont work you tell me. Bummer… Thanks..

 

[balamw]

If you still have the original HDD and Windows partition (not the backup/folder) you can make Winclone work for you, it's just easier to reinstall from scratch.

B

 

[jwolf6589]

If you still have the original HDD and Windows partition (not the backup/folder) you can make Winclone work for you, it's just easier to reinstall from scratch.

B

Well I did it. Man no wonder they pay PC admins so much! What a pain Windows is! All is done so I have 300GB free on my Mac and 71 GB's free on the bootCamp partition. I no longer am running out of hard drive space, so I can take pictures at a higher res, take videos at a higher res, and download iTunes movies! Someday I may install LION, but to do so I need to upgrade Office 2004 and Quicken 2006. I hear Quicken is out so there is a replacement app that will import Quicken files, however I forgot the name of it.

 

[johnhurley]

Man no wonder they pay PC admins so much!

You got me laughing here ... not to be mean to the desktop support people but ... lots of other places in IT with better pay ranges.