Windows 7 Disk Recovery In Boot Camp Environment

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Situation: Mac Mini with 100GB HDD. 40GB to OSX and 60GB to Win7 Running out of space, so I obtain a 500GB from OWC.

I don't really use the MAC install, so I dont bother with a backup of that, but I use Windows 7 Disk Backup.

Fast forward to post-HDD install. I install Snow Leopard and run Boot Camp Assistant. I allocate 150 to OSX and the remainder to Win7. Instead of booting from the install disc, I boot from my rescue disk, and perform a restore.

However, it turns out the restore assumes it's on the same HDD and rewrites the partition table to match the old one. Win7 now sees the OSX drive as 40GB and itself as 60GB, with the remainder as unallocated space. However, OSX still sees the partitions the old way. While both OSs currently work, I imagine the day will come when bad things happen to my data if they have conflicting partition maps.

I now have the old drive attached via USB. I also have an empty 500GB external drive.

How can I do a disk image - like backup of a Win7 install (preserving files, programs, settings; everything) without it rewriting the partition table and causing Boot Camp havok?

Is there anyway of doing a disk-image
 
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2011 Mac mini and 2010 13" MacBook Pro, iPhone 4 and iPad
Although I've haven't used it yet, alot of people use WinClone for backup/copying of the Bootcamp Windows partition.
 

chscag

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Do not use WinClone. It's buggy and is no longer being developed although there still is limited support in a user forum.

You can try to use the built in Windows 7 backup program to create an image to an external drive formatted to NTFS. I'm not certain, but I don't think the Win 7 image backup copies the partition table or boot sector since it assumes you can boot from the Win 7 DVD.
 
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Got Winclone v2.2 to work w/Boot Camp and Win7...

...make sure that, "Use "special" compressed image format that is not mountable etc, etc" is selected in preferences. When I initially used "mountable Disk Image format", I kept getting errors. When restoring the image, know that it'll take at least an hour - I'm using a 2008 Mac Pro w/16 GB of RAM. And it did allow for cloning and restoring to a larger partition. Good luck...
 

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