Clone Windows 7 from Laptop onto Bootcamp partition

Hi all,

I was wondering if what I had planned will work.

Install Windows 7 to bootcamp partition then I would have to install the mac windows drivers...

After that I was thinking I would use winclone to copy my windows 7 partition from my gateway laptop onto the bootcamp partition, after which, I would have to reinstall the mac windows drivers because the initial W7 install will be wiped in the process.

Is there a set sequence it goes through, as in, if it has already copied the drivers once, it won't do it again or will it just recognize that the drivers are not there and ask for the disc again.

Are there any other snags I should be aware of with this?

As for the windows license, I don't plan on using the Gateway laptop after this so there will be technically only one copy of the software in use.

I need to do this so I can run my adobe software eg. Premiere on a faster computer than the gateway but I don't have the mac versions.

Thanks for any help.

Steve

First, the Gateway license for Windows 7 is an OEM license specific for the Gateway machine and can not be used on any other machine. That would be in violation of the MS EULA. Second, it won't work anyway since in order for it to install properly and function, the copy of Windows 7 must either be a full install MS boxed copy or a full install OEM System Builder's copy.

Yep, to add onto what chscag already said, that's just not the way Boot Camp works. Boot Camp simply facilitates the installation of Windows natively on your Mac.

With that said, products like VMWare Fusion and Parallels Desktop have so called "P2V" features (Physical to Virtual) that will encapsulate an existing physical machine and port it into a VM. In this way, you'll need to retire the Windows installation on the Gateway machine, but you can take absolutely everything with you very easily.

Ok,

Thanks for the replies.

I wondered about sufficient mac drivers not being on my clone install but thought maybe I could do a repair with the windows 7 disc.

Anyway, I didn't want to go with parallels or vmware because of reports of being slow operating both of the OS on the machine but I have read some posts here and they are the contrary... no slow down etc. This MBP is a significant upgrade from the gateway so even if the virtual machine is a little slower than running natively, it should still be an improvement over the Gateway.

Is there a quick list of pros vs. cons of the two softwares: Parallels and VMWare?

Thanks again.

REally enjoying the new MBP.

I decided to go with Virtualbox (can't beat the price) and make an image of my Gateway disk with Acronis and convert the tib image with VMware Convertor. With any luck I'll be running windows on this mac sometime tomorrow.

Thanks for the help!

macandsteve said:

I decided to go with Virtualbox (can't beat the price) and make an image of my Gateway disk with Acronis and convert the tib image with VMware Convertor. With any luck I'll be running windows on this mac sometime tomorrow.

Thanks for the help!

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Let us know how you make out with that, I hadn't heard of that approach until now.

Interesting macandsteve.

Have used Acronis True Image and not really that impressed with it. Maybe too used to SuperDuper. Would imagine you will run into trouble when it comes to activation which is still required with Bootcamp.

harryb2448 said:

Interesting macandsteve.

Have used Acronis True Image and not really that impressed with it.

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Earlier incarnations of Acronis were quite awesome. After I updated to "True Image Home 2010", I was less impressed. They dumbed the UI down and made it difficult to do a lot of the more common tasks that those of us accustomed to PQDI and Ghost were used to.

Maybe too used to SuperDuper. Would imagine you will run into trouble when it comes to activation which is still required with Bootcamp.

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He's using VirtualBox, but that's a valid point. I know Fusion (and probably Parallels) has hooks that take care of product activation issues. Not so sure about VB, which is relatively immature.

Keep us posted on your progress macandsteve. It is one of those things one learns by others experiences.

Well, after some fits and starts, I am finally getting a vmdk file transferred to the mbp.

Acronis faled 8 minutes after I left it to do it's work for the night, second attempt this morning failed as well. ran checkdisk and found one bad sector. After that, acronis would no longer run properly on the gateway (couldn't find localhost) so I pulled the Hd and put it in an enclosure and use acronis on a work computer. I found out that our acronis also does the conversion directly to VMDK so I ran it with that option and that is the file that I am copying ATM. It's going to be a while to copy a 218 GB file over the network so we shall see how it unfolds tomorrow.

Looks like I have another flaw. When I made the backup I only backed up the OS partition and it looks like I should have done the whole disk. I wondered about that. It doesn't look like there is any way to get into the boot.ini to change it at this point. back to square one.

At last!

The Acronis VMDK image is working perfectly. I may have to download some drivers like video card etc. so I can get proper resolutions but other than that it is working.

It didn't start up at first but I went into the settings and enabled "Enable IO APIC" and changed the boot sequence to "hard disk" only and it started after that.

Thanks for the suggestions and advice.

The guest tools in VirtualBox should address all of the needed drivers. Did you force the install yet?

cwa107 said:

The guest tools in VirtualBox should address all of the needed drivers. Did you force the install yet?

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I will have to do some poking around later; at work at the moment. I have not seen anything like 'guest tools' in VB. Newb question, how do you force the install?

macandsteve said:

I will have to do some poking around later; at work at the moment. I have not seen anything like 'guest tools' in VB. Newb question, how do you force the install?

Click to expand...

I assume it's similar to VMWare Fusion - but if you run the VM in windowed mode, you should have a menu where you can "install guest tools" or something to that effect.