Migrating Dual-Boot Bootcamp to new Drive

[scotttaylor]

I currently have a single 1TB HD containing two bootable partitions each running a copy of Win7 Ultimate on a MacPro 3,1. The disk is formatted using GPT and contains a 200MB EFI partition along with the two booatable NTFS partitions. This setup has been working fine but it's time to increase the size of the partitions. I bought a WD WD20EARX (2 TB) and used Acronis True Image Home 2012 to clone the old drive onto the new drive and manually expanded the partition sizes to 1.2TB and .6TB respectively. The clone operation succeeded but when I boot the MacPro and hold down the option key to select which system to boot, the Mac does not recognize the new drive as bootable. In the past when I was on XP I remember having to run the Windows recovery tools to patch up the master boot record to get things working again. However, when I try to run Win7's recovery tools it complains with the following "This version of system recovery options is not compatible with the version of Windows you are trying to repair." I'm not sure if this is MacPro specific or not but wondered if anyone else has navigated these waters before...

 

[scotttaylor]

If I boot MacOS X and go into the Startup Disk System Prefs the two Win7 partitions are listed from my new 2TB disk. If I select one and Restart it tries to boot but I end up with a message saying "no bootable media found" (or something close to that) and it just hangs. Seems like I'm missing one last step to make those GPT partitions bootable....

 

[scotttaylor]

Finally got this working but it ain't pretty...

I ended up starting over and used the Win7 installer DVD to create the two larger partitions on the new drive, then let the Windows7 installer install two new temporary instances of Win7 on each partition. The Win7 installer configures the boot manager to dual boot the machine. Then I used Acronis Disk Director to copy my old partitions onto the new drive. I still had to run the Win7 installer DVD repair functionality to patch up the copied partitions so they were bootable again but that worked. Now I have two instances of Win7 in expanded partitions without having to reinstall everything from scratch. I'm sure there's a better way or a better tool to do this.

What a pain. Made me appreciate how easy this stuff is on the Mac...

 

[scottsjack]

Finally got this working but it ain't pretty...

I ended up starting over and used the Win7 installer DVD to create the two larger partitions on the new drive, then let the Windows7 installer install two new temporary instances of Win7 on each partition. The Win7 installer configures the boot manager to dual boot the machine. Then I used Acronis Disk Director to copy my old partitions onto the new drive. I still had to run the Win7 installer DVD repair functionality to patch up the copied partitions so they were bootable again but that worked. Now I have two instances of Win7 in expanded partitions without having to reinstall everything from scratch. I'm sure there's a better way or a better tool to do this.

What a pain. Made me appreciate how easy this stuff is on the Mac...

I had a similar problem making a single Windows 7 partition on a separate HD work. My goal was to have both an OS X HD and a Windows HD, each which could work on its own. I couldn't get Windows to boot until I found out that I was not partitioning the Windows drive as bootable. I just figured that the W7 install disk would do it automatically.

The Mac install still shows Bootcamp even though the Bootcamp partition on the Mac HD is long gone. When I start the MP it auto boots to Lion. If I hold the option key at start up I get a choice of Lion, Windows (the non-existent old Bootcamp install, Windows (W7 HD) and Lion recovery. If I remove the Mac HD the machine autoboots to Windows. Works perfectly but I'm not quite sure of the exact steps that led me there!