Hard drive failing and I want to save my data.

[Lankysean]

So I have a mid 2010 Mac Pro and the Hard Drive is failing. I have a Boot Camp partition that I don't want to lose because I think I've used all my Window's licenses up and finding all the drivers was a bit of a pain in the neck. I don't really care about the OSX side as much since I just got OSX 10.8 and was going to do a clean install anyway. Another issue, unsure if it matters is the old hard drive is a 1tb but I picked up a 500gb ssd hybrid drive, the old drive is mostly empty as I knew this day was coming.

Anyway, can time machine do this or do I need another program?

Thanks

 

[brop52]

Time machine can't do this.

You need to clone over your boot camp partition. Use Winclone.

 

[chrise2]

If you legit own Windows, you can call the activation phone number to force an activation. Drivers in boot camp should be pretty straight forward nowadays.

 

[brop52]

If you legit own Windows, you can call the activation phone number to force an activation. Drivers in boot camp should be pretty straight forward nowadays.

Reinstalling windows is a pain in the ass. Cloning is what he needs to do not waste time with reinstallation etc.

 

[Lankysean]

Reinstalling windows is a pain in the ass. Cloning is what he needs to do not waste time with reinstallation etc.

Yeah, installing windows is a massive pain. I'm going to try cloning the drive when I get off work. Will it be a problem that the source and target drives aren't the same size?

Thanks for the help guys.

 

[brop52]

Yeah, installing windows is a massive pain. I'm going to try cloning the drive when I get off work. Will it be a problem that the source and target drives aren't the same size?

Thanks for the help guys.

There are some built in ways of creating the image file smaller than it starts with. (If you shrink the new partition you will run into the problem).

 

[Lankysean]

There are some built in ways of creating the image file smaller than it starts with. (If you shrink the new partition you will run into the problem).

I just set windows up as a larger partition so 200gb (down from 700gb) OSX and 300gb for Windows. I didn't care about losing the space on the OSX side as I mostly keep my files on an external hard drive. Anyway, that worked out for me. Thanks for all the help!!