Using Windows Vista in Bootcamp, Parallels w/ Time Machine in OS X on a Macbook Pro

[dafernan]

I want to make sure I'm doing this properly. I recently acquired a Macbook Pro, along with legit copy of Win Vista. So here's what I did:

1. Reinstall Mac OS X from scratch, then get ALL the software updates. Perfectly clean! Then installed the additional applications from the 2nd disk (Q1: Is that second disk what is called Leopard?)

2. Backed up my Mac with Time Machine to my external Seagate drive.

3. Used Bootcamp to create a partition, then install Windows Vista Home Basic edition on to it, then installed the Macbook Pro drivers, then got ALL the microsoft updates (which took forever).

4. Back in Mac OS X, installed my legit copy of Parallels and then ran my Windows bootcamp partition in Mac OS X too (so now, I can use it either in Bootcamp "native" mode for speed or Parallels "dual" mode for convenience). It never asked me for activation or anything, and appears to be working.

Q2: I believe that Time Machine backs up the Mac OS X partition, but not the Bootcamp partition. Is that true?

Q3: Will Parallels create a VM in addition to the Bootcamp machine when I try to run that bootcamp partition? If so, how does Time Machine deal with that -- would it try to back that up too? Would I want to do this? And if not, how do I stop this from happening (i.e. how do I exclude that)?

Q4: What would be a simple way to back up the Windows partition? I'd like to be able to save an image of the Bootcamp partition to another External hard drive, in case I want to restore it.

Q5: If I run Vista in parallels, then in bootcamp, and alternate randomly depending on my needs, is there anything I should be paying attention to that could get screwed up?

Thanks!!

 

[VPrime]

1)No, The applications disc is pretty much just iLife. Leopard would be the first disc, the system recovery disc.

2)Correct, time machine will only back up the osx partition (you can also select folders for it not to back up in the settings)

3)As far as I am aware, no. It won't create an actual VM, it just creates the necessary files to boot the other partition. The OS, and all data are still loaded from the bootcamp partition.

4)There is an app called Winclone, this will create an image of your windows partition.

5)There have been some reports of parallels causing your bootcamp partition to fail and no longer work. I don't know the full details of this as I use vmware, but it has been posted about before.I don't know if it is common, or if it has been fixed with the latest version.

 

[DoFoT9]

Wirelessly posted (nokia e63: Mozilla/5.0 (SymbianOS/9.2; U; Series60/3.1 NokiaE63-1/100.21.110; Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 ) AppleWebKit/413 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/413)

yea it will not create a VM of the bootcamp, it directly accessed the partition.

Time machine will not back it up, winclone is the best solution by far!