Restoring a Boot Camp Partition...

[Ants42]

Hello,

I recently upgraded my Macbook Pro's hard drive. The old hard drive had both a OS X partition and a Windows 7 Boot Camp partition. My current hard drive only has a OS X partition. I've encased my old hard drive (containing the two partitions) in a cheap external hard drive case, assessable via USB.

The goal is to make a Boot Camp partition on the new hard drive which is an exact replica of the old Boot Camp partition. I no longer have my Windows 7 discs or a spare serial, otherwise I would have made a fresh Boot Camp partition. As far as I know, the only way to get Windows running again with a valid serial is to restore my old partition. I don't give a crap about my old data, I just want Windows running.

Looking in Disc Utility, I see a Restore tab under BOOTCAMP which seems to suggest that if I restored the old Windows 7 partition (via USB) to a new blank partition, that would essentially copy the Boot Camp partition over to my new Mac?

Is this correct? Do I have any better options relevant to my situation? I don't want to mess anything up, though I do have a Time Machine back-up just in case.

Thanks

 

[Intell]

Use Winclone. Make sure you get the Lion version.

 

[Ants42]

Cheers, I'll give it a go. Any idea whether the method I explained would work (even if it isn't advised)? Just curious.

Edit: Am I missing something? Winclone doesn't let me restore my partition without creating a new Boot Camp first, which requires Windows 7 discs.

 

[hafr]

Cheers, I'll give it a go. Any idea whether the method I explained would work (even if it isn't advised)? Just curious.

Edit: Am I missing something? Winclone doesn't let me restore my partition without creating a new Boot Camp first, which requires Windows 7 discs.

If you open Boot Camp Assistant, choose Install Windows 7, partitioning the hard drive is done before actually installing anything. Doesn't it go through with the partitioning if you try it without the Win7 disc?

 

[Ants42]

If you open Boot Camp Assistant, choose Install Windows 7, partitioning the hard drive is done before actually installing anything. Doesn't it go through with the partitioning if you try it without the Win7 disc?

Nope, it requires a disk before even partitioning. WinClone gives me nothing but errors too (yeah, I'm using the Lion version). I even tried booting my old OS X through the old hard drive through USB and using WinClone there - nothing. Shame Apple doesn't let optical drive users to boot Windows 7 from USB.

 

[hafr]

Nope, it requires a disk before even partitioning. WinClone gives me nothing but errors too (yeah, I'm using the Lion version). I even tried booting my old OS X through the old hard drive through USB and using WinClone there - nothing. Shame Apple doesn't let optical drive users to boot Windows 7 from USB.

Have you tried partitioning the drive in Disk Utility? I'm not sure, but it seems unlikely that the partitioning is made differently depending on whether it's via Boot Camp Assistant or Disk Utility...

 

[Ants42]

Have you tried partitioning the drive in Disk Utility? I'm not sure, but it seems unlikely that the partitioning is made differently depending on whether it's via Boot Camp Assistant or Disk Utility...

I haven't. I haven't found any positive talk about doing this through Disk Utility, so I'm a little hesitant. If anyone could provide a 100% sure answer I think that could be a good idea.

Edit: I've given WinClone another go and (no idea why) it's no longer giving me errors. I'm currently making an image of my old Boot Camp. Presumably I can make a new blank partition using Disk Utility on my internal hard drive, then when I'm restoring the WinClone image it will reformat the new partition with my old Boot Camp. Correct? My old Boot Camp is 33GB, am I right in thinking I couldn't reduce this to 32GB? I'd like to, but for no real purpose really.

Edit: So I'm trying to Restore having created a new partition, but I keep getting a 'No Windows Partition found' error, help?

 

[uberandroid]

I've been working on restoring my Boot Camp partition to my 2012 MBP's optibay drive for the past week and now I've finally done it and I'm about to jump for joy.

I read tons of incomplete and incorrect information so I'm writing this for anyone who is having trouble. Note: for the 2012 MBP with Optibay the HD with Windows must go in the original slot, not optibay slot.

So I backed up my drive with both Winclone and the Disk Utility disk image. Winclone didn't work for me, not sure why, when restoring my image it would simply hang.

I restored with the Disk Utility created image backup, and no windows drive was detected, because the HD was in the Optibay drive. I switched them and now I was allowed to select Windows as the boot drive, but it still wouldn't boot.

Once the windows partition can be seen upon booting, next I had to go into Windows RE via the bootable USB, and type the following into the command prompt:
bootrec.exe /fixmbr
bootrec.exe /fixboot
bootrec.exe /rebuildbcd

There it is, sorry for posting this to an old thread but this is for anyone who is also having this problem.