Need advices: HD upgrade, arranging partitions

This is the problem. I don't know of an easy way to do this. I tried winclone, but could not get it to work for me. It's either a weak app, or the instructions are poorly written. When I put my 320 gig drive in my MBP, I just reran bootcamp and reinstalled from my XP CD. Heck, I even tried using dd to clone the small drive to the new drive, then use iPartition to expand the partitions and that did not work.

 

This is what I did to upgrade my penryn 2.4 stock 200gb to 320gb WD hard drive. I don't know if there is a simpler way but I wanted to transfer my leopard partition and windows vista partition (bootcamp) to my new hard drive without having to reload vista.

1. Booting to your Windows platform, Vista in my case, do a complete Disk Repair of your Windows partition. You'll need to reboot to do this as a scheduled repair. This prepares your Windows partition for your next step. THIS STEP is critical because otherwise Winclone gave me errors/crashes.

2. Under OS X, using Winclone, create a image of your NTFS partition. I saved a copy of this on the desktop of my Mac partition, so I can access later. Only thing checked off on the option page of Winclone is remove pagefile.sys. Detailed guide is available on the Winclone site.

3. Used Superduper to copy my mac partition to an external drive (this part was easy because I used as my target a new external 320gb western digital passport drive, which I planned to remove and exchange with my stock drive). Make sure the external drive is formatted to Mac OS extended Journal with GUID partition scheme (this is under options during the format process when using Disk Utility). At this point, the 320gb drive has only the Mac partition. The partition scheme is important here otherwise you can't use bootcamp to create a new partition later.

2. Tested my new external copy by booting from the USB connected 320gb drive (hold down option while boot). It should boot normally, although slower because of the USB interface. Now shutdown.

3. Exchanged the stock 200gb with my new WD 320GB hard drive.

4. Booted to OS X Leopard. No problems!! Faster boot with a faster drive!

5. Used Bootcamp to create a Windows partition of desired size. It needs to be at least same size or bigger than before (Winclone option). After partition insert a Windows CD/DVD to install (we'll use the CD/DVD for only the next step, not to actually install Windows).

6. The created Bootcamp is FAT32. (I don't think Bootcamp can create NTFS partition). I wanted NTFS. Once the CD/DVD reboots, the Windows install screen starts, you can reformat the Bootcamp partition to NTFS. Once reformated, exit the install. Reboot back to Mac.

7. Use Winclone to restore image (which was on the Mac desktop in my case), to the NTFS partition.

8. Once Winclone is done, insert Windows CD/DVD and reboot holding down the option key. Choose to boot from the Windows install disk. Choose repair Windows partition (necessary to fix the boot profile in Windows).

9. Everything was working again. I did not have to reactivate Windows Vista.

I hope this helps.

 

It's no wonder people hate windows. What a pain in the @$$ just to clone a drive.

Does Winclone work with FAT32?