12-21-2009, 12:07 AM

I'm having some trouble doing a back up. Here's the situation:

I bought a 500 GB hard drive for my white Macbook - it had a 160 GB drive and I filled it up. I bought an external enclosure to transfer and it came with Carbon Copy Cloner. The transfer went well and everything was fine. I was not using the external drive anymore and have been backing up with Time Machine to a 1TB time capsule.

I have been using ~ 230 GB of it, and steadily rising. Then my Macbook's screen died. I decided to use it as a desktop, and bought a Macbook Pro for my daily needs. I bought it used, and it had Snow Leopard and VMware installed and a Bootcamp partition. The Macbook Pro had a 250GB hard drive on it. I decided I wanted to do the following:

1. Clone the new drive (250 GB) to the external drive (160 GB).
2. Wipe the 250 GB drive clean, then clone the 500 GB drive to it.
3. Clone the 160 GB drive to the 500 GB drive and install it in my new Macbook Pro.

All was going fine - I cloned the new drive (about 70 GB or so used) onto the external drive. Then I tried to clone the Bootcamp partition, and CCC said it couldn't do it. I found the disk that came with the 500 GB drive and it included a copy of Novastor Novabackup. Running Fusion I tried to use it to copy the Bootcamp partition over to the external drive but was unsuccesful - getting an error message that said the drive was the wrong type.

How do I go about making a copy of everything on my current 250 GB drive onto the 160 GB drive - including both partitions? Help!?!?

Thanks in advance!!!

12-21-2009, 12:59 AM

OK it looks like you have arranged things so that everything will physically fir on the drive. The problem that you are having is a bit different. I believe Novabackup is looking for a drive that is formatted for the PC (NTFS). Your chosen drive is formatted in the Mac format (HFS+). What you need is a program capable of storing the backup of your Windows partition in a format the Mac drive can handle. Give Winclone a try. I have only used it a few times but people I trust swear by it. It will clone your XP or Vista partition but I don't think it has been updated for Win 7 yet.

12-22-2009, 07:03 PM

thanks slydude - you've nailed the problem exactly. I'm going to give Winclone a try and will let you know how it goes...

Thanks again!!!

12-22-2009, 09:35 PM

You're welcome. Hopefully Winclone will solve your problem. I haven't done much with my Windows partitions so not much need to clone them. I try to run Windows as little as possible.

01-10-2010, 03:51 PM

danthomander, did it work?