restore bootcamp from time machine

[medernach]

I'm not very computer savy so sorry if I seem slow! I'm trying to restore my bootcamp partition from time machine but it says I don't have enough disk space. I have already restored the mac side with no problem. Any advice is greatly appreciated!

 

[balamw]

Time Machine usually doesn't back up your Boot Camp partition, and if your Boot Camp partition is formatted NTFS it will generally be read only which could lead to the not enough space messages.

Can you provide more information. Which Mac? Which version of OS X and Windows?

B

 

[medernach]

I have a macbook, it was windows 7 and I was using leopard, but just switched to snow leopard after restoring my mac side.

 

[balamw]

W7 will only install on NTFS, so definitely your Windows partition is read only (unless you installed NTFS-3G or the like). So you have three problems.

1. Unless you did something special, Time Machine does not contain a backup of your Windows partition
2. Unless you installed NTFS-3G (or something like it) your Windows partition is read only from OS X (where Time Machine can run)
3. Time Machine isn't a good tool for backing Windows up. e.g. it doesn't know how to make Windows bootable.

Did you specifically tell Time Machine to back up your Windows partition? Do you have NTFS-3G or something similar installed?

Winclone is a good tool for backing Windows partitions up from Mac OS, and if you stored your Winclone image where Time Machine would back it up you would be able to have Time Machine do "snapshots" of your Windows partition, though not as granular as Mac OS Time Machine backups.

B

 

[medernach]

Ok so does that mean my stuff I had on windows is lost then? Or is there a way I can recover it?

 

[balamw]

Ok so does that mean my stuff I had on windows is lost then? Or is there a way I can recover it?

Can you lead us though a bit more of the background? If all you did was upgrade from Leopard to Snow Leopard your Windows partition and all its contents should be intact. So please let us know how you got to this point, and why you think you need to restore.

B

 

[medernach]

Originally I had my mac partitioned by a pro using windows 7 and leopard. I was getting messages that I was running out of space on the mac side. So I bought time capsule and parallels. I set up Time capsule and made back ups of my documents on cd for both partitions. Then before I installed Parallels I deleted my partition so I would have more room on my mac . Installed parallels and then installed Snow Leopard, windows 7 and simply. I used my back ups (cd) for simply and tried to use it for excell, my excell files just showed up as photos on my cd. So this is why I wanted to restore everything from before I installed Parallels. Long story but now I'm at a loss as to where to go from here. I did restore the mac partition from before the changes but can't restore bootcamp because I didn't specify time capsule to back it up properly. Thanks for the help.

 

[balamw]

Ah. I see, flying without a net. Quite daring for someone who describes themselves as not very computer savvy.

Personally, I'm paranoid and usually make 2 or three different backups besides my regular one before I attempt anything like you were trying.

Next time you get the urge to change the size of your partitions, check out the handy-dandy MR Guide.

http://guides.macrumors.com/Extend_or_Resize_Boot_Camp_Partition

B

 

[CLuv]

After you reinstall your boot camp partition back it up using a program called WinClone. It's free and backs up your windows partition while in OS X. I back my partition up to an external and I do the same for my boss who uses only windows on her Mac. I don't have the link available right now, but I'll post it tomorrow if you can't find it via Google.

 

[balamw]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_1_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile/7E18 Safari/528.16)

http://twocanoes.com/winclone/

As I mentioned before if you store your winclone image on the OS X partition it will be backed up by Time Machine.

B