Question? Is it possible re-installing Mac OS X by keeping BootCamp Windows 7?

Use the windows 7 backup/recovery utility to create a system image of your current win 7 on an external drive.

After the OS X re-install you can recreate your windows 7 partition and recover the Win 7 system image. You can do that by kicking off the bootcamp install again and when you go into the win 7 install part put in your win 7 ( 64 bit ) disk and choose recover and then get the whole win 7 system back.

 

It's somewhere under Accessories I think. It is in your Start/Programs menu.

You can use that same utility to create a Recovery Disk that you can boot off and restore an image.

 

Start-Control Panel-Backup and Restore

 

Maintenance => Backup and Recovery => Create System Image

When I was restoring my bootcamp partition ( after deleting/recreating it thru bootcamp assistant ) I was not able to use the recovery disk.

I think it was the bootcamp assistant that was picky and wanted specifically the windows 7 install disk ( versus accepting a win recovery disk ).

The win 7 64 install disk however works just fine to invoke the system recovery from the install disk.

 

That is good to know. I have a MBA so Bootcamp wants to see the ISO image on a USB stick. But this is good to know as I haven't had a chance to try out a system image recovery. Thanks!

 

If you do a clean install of OSX it will only affect the OSX partition - it will not touch the BootCamp partition....

There is no need to backup and restore Windows 7 UNLESS you want to reformat the entire hard disk (why ?)

Just do a clean install on your Mac partition and leave the Windows 7 partition as it is.

 

Hi, I am very interested in your answer and would like to know a bit more detail. First, I used Win7 build-in utility to create a most up-to-date "System image" on an external hard drive, and a "repair disk" (a CD). The repair disk is used to boot up a PC, but now we are talking about Mac. Your suggestion is to Start the boot camp, partition and format the disk (for Win7) using the original Win7 Install disk (DVD). The install disk will give me an option to choose, such as "restore". Then, I can point it to the external hard drive, where my system image file resides, and it can restore the image back to the bootcamp partition. Right. Am I missing anything?