Bootcamp Partition/Hard Drive Question

[mroderic]

Hi everyone,

I recently bought macboook after using windows for 23 yrs and love it. I however needed to put bootcamp on it so i can use certain programs at work. I did this and was able to install everything sucessfully, my only question is regarding the hard drive capacity. I am not sure where in the process this happened but I seemed to have chosen a small capacit portion of my hard drive to partition for XP usage and now I only have I think a total of 10 and with installs and other progrms I have 1g remaining. I need at least another 5-10 gigs for data usage prob 15g, and with my remaing 1g on windows partition this is a problem.

My question is how do I change this is it simple or do i have to go through it again and lose everything.


Thank you for your time everyone I really enjoy the site ive been peering in back and forth for 2yrs as i researched apple etc.

-Marc-

 

[panzer06]

Hi everyone,

I recently bought macboook after using windows for 23 yrs and love it. I however needed to put bootcamp on it so i can use certain programs at work. I did this and was able to install everything sucessfully, my only question is regarding the hard drive capacity. I am not sure where in the process this happened but I seemed to have chosen a small capacit portion of my hard drive to partition for XP usage and now I only have I think a total of 10 and with installs and other progrms I have 1g remaining. I need at least another 5-10 gigs for data usage prob 15g, and with my remaing 1g on windows partition this is a problem.

My question is how do I change this is it simple or do i have to go through it again and lose everything.

Thank you for your time everyone I really enjoy the site ive been peering in back and forth for 2yrs as i researched apple etc.

-Marc-

Assuming you have a large enough hard drive in the MB and an external hard drive to copy the data to, you will not need to lose all your work.

You should download Winclone and Superduper to backup the Mac & Windows partitions.

Once you have successfully backed up your data you can then work on resizing the partitions.

Bootcamp allows the system to revert to a full Mac partition. Once you've done so, you can run the Bootcamp assistant again to create the Windows size that works best for you. (Someone here may know a way to do this in a single step instead of two.)

Use Winclone to copy the backup Windows partition you created earlier to the newly enlarged Windows partition.

Once Complete, reboot and all should be well.

Good luck,

 

[sushi]

Use Winclone to copy the backup Windows partition you created earlier to the newly enlarged Windows partition.

Have you done this technique yourself, and had no problems with it?

 

[panzer06]

Have you done this technique yourself, and had no problems with it?

Yes, I moved my Windows partition from my old MB CD 2.0 to my new MBP 2.2.

I took the extra step of making two Winclone copies, one with the exact size of the old windows partition and the second with the "prepare for restoring on a different partition" option selected.

I was making the new Windows partition smaller on the MBP so I needed to select that option. Selecting that option manipulates the existing partition hence the need to create a perfect copy first. I even went so far as to restore the perfect copy to an external drive and verify I could read the files even if I couldn't test the ability to boot from the cloned partition.

I make frequent backups and have over 2 TB of disk on 4 drives so I can rotate copies off-site to our bank safe deposit box. I do not want to ever lose a significant portion of my data. I make superduper updates to my clones nightly and Winclone copies monthly (no data stored under Windows, just programs that won't run under OS X).

I only made the Superduper copies just in case, and so I would have a full copy on my fast FW800 drive to suck the accounts and applications from my prior install to the new Mac.

Cheers,

 

[sushi]

Yes, I moved my Windows partition from my old MB CD 2.0 to my new MBP 2.2.

<big snip>

Thanks. Good to hear.

I've been looking for a better way than I've been doing it.

My way took a lot of steps. Yours is much simpler.

Mine involved using Disk Utility to make a back up of my Boot Camp partition.

I use CCC on the Mac side since is works well for me.

To restore the Boot Camp partition, I needed to use my Windows XP install CD to initialize the partition and format it. Then when the Installer App restarts, I boot into the Mac side (Instead of letting Windows XP install) and then restore the image from Disk Utility by copying the files over.

Nice to see a simpler and easier way to back up a Boot Camp partition.

BTW, I asked the CCC folks if they were going to add the capability of backing up a Boot Camp partition directly. They said that they were looking at adding that option. That would even make it easier to do. One program that backs up both the Mac and Boot Camp partition.

Looking forward to trying this new method!