"Spring Cleaning" on the Hard Drive

[mrmeister]

Hi guys,

My drive has been slowly getting clogged up with crap I don't really need for the past couple of years, and I've meant to do this sooner, so now I'm going to completely wipe and reinstall OS X, BootCamp and possibly Linux this time too.

I just have a quick question: If I make an image of my BootCamp drive and save that to an external hard drive, then wipe my entire drive... once I install OS X, can I just partition the drive how I want it and restore the disk image to the new partition? Will all work correctly then, or am I going to have to start my windows partition again? It is only games, mostly Steam, so it wouldn't be a HUGE deal, but in the interest of saving time and effort...?


Thanks

edit: Also, as you can see in my signature, i don't have an internal optical drive any more - i replaced it with an SSD. So, if i can't do what i'm asking above, can Windows 8 be installed via USB, and is it just as simple as making an image of my Windows 8 install CD and moving it to a USB drive?

 

[balamw]

If you make the image of your W8 partition with Winclone you should be able to restore it in the way you want.

Otherwise, installing from an ISO is the only way to install W8 on many new Macs that don't have an optical drive. You will need USB media big enough for the image.

B