Does Bootcamp For Mac Require Windows 7

Conventional wisdom was to give your Windows partition about 100GB, and that would work for 'ordinary' Windows tasks (not for Video editing and such). Be sure you do not use ANY Windows Utilities to format or resize the BootCamp partitions, or it will wipe out the Mac partition and your Mac OS X will be lost! Use ONLY BootCamp to make any changes.

Hello, I am hoping someone here more computer-savvy than myself may be able to help. I have a Macbook Pro and have installed OSX Snow Leopard and Bootcamp along with the retail version of Windows 7.

So I have just two partitions. Last week i spent an exhaustive amount of time tweaking Windows 7 and getting it set up just the way I like it. I then of course realized that I would need about 50GB more space.

I used the Windows 7 backup feature to image my installation of Windows 7 and it completed fine and I have since restored form the image so at least I know my hard work has been backed up. Now, I have tried Winclone but it fails to backup the partition. I have tried to create a new partition via Windows but it screws up the partition scheme for both OS's.

I plopped down $50 for IPartition, but as far as I can tell it is not able to work with Windows 7. If I restore the Mac to one partiton and then create a larger Bootcamp partition, upon restoring the Windows 7 image, I have lost all of the additional space that I was trying to gain and my Windows installation has the exact same amoutn of free space as when it was imaged. The additional space goes into 'limbo' where Windows can't see it and the Mac sees the space as missing, but with no way to maipulate it. The bottom line is this: Is there any way that I could successfully enlarge my Bootcamp partition and then restore my Windows 7 image without losing the additional space? Thank you and please let me know if you need more detail to help answer this question.

Winclone 2.2 is perfect for this kind of job. You just have to know your way around. First make sure you set the right preferences.

The special compressed image works way faster than the mountable image type. Unless you want to extract particular data files from a mounted image you should always use the compressed image for better speed. You also should pay attention the tools tab in the main menue. It contains options to expand and shrink NTFS file systems. If you modify your partition to become smaller you obviously first have to shrink your file system before you create the image.

When you re-install that shrunk file system from image you must expand it before you try to boot it. If you don't you will most likely have BSOD. Windows will try to create a desktop and page out file and run out of memory for the shrunk file system. If you restore an image to a larger partition you need to expand the file system after the installation to take up the whole increased partition. Another issue that particularly Mac Pro users screw up is the partition table.

If you use a laptop with only one drive you must use the Bootcamp partitioning utility. If you use a dedicated hard drive as most Mac Pro users do you can alternatively use the Windows install dialogue to create a partition table. Bootcamp will always produce an Apple conform GUID partition table but Windows will default to a MBR partition table. Winclone is designed to work with Apple GUID tables. So do yourself a favor and use the bootcamp utility even when Windows uses the only visible partition on the drive. Thanks guys, I'm trying hard to narrow down my issue.

One thing I can tell you that I may have taken for granted, is that the current Boot Camp partion Windows Install is restored form a Window sbackup image. It is my understanding that a successful system image restoration puts your computer back to exactly how it was before you created the image, file for file. Could it be that Winclone is having difficulty backing up a restored image, or should that even matter. On the bootcamp partition Windows runs fine without hitches.

Still chipping away at this issue.

In a multi-platform world, being able to switch back and forth between the two platforms is a crucial part of what I do. For some comparisons, I find it useful to run Windows directly, without the interference of a virtualization layer. For that, the only alternative is to run Apple’s Boot Camp software. After multiple Windows installations on Apple hardware and much research (including a thorough reading of the Boot Camp Installation and Setup Guide [] and hours on Apple’s ), I’ve concluded that Boot Camp is second only to iTunes in its ability to inflict pain on Windows users. It has some unexpected limitations, and setup is more complex than it needs to be.

(Why, it’s almost as if Apple is trying to make this process difficult.) I have no illusions that Apple will pay any attention to my complaints and improve Boot Camp. But I decided to share my experiences here anyway, in the expectation that I can save you a few hours of banging your head against the wall if you need to use Boot Camp. In this post, I assume you’re trying to install Windows 7 on an Intel-based Mac and that you’re following the official instructions. Here are the gotchas you need to know about. If this were a plain old PC, I would have lots of options. I could run setup from a USB flash drive, or use an external DVD drive, or even copy the setup files to a local hard drive and start the installer from that drive.