In a previous post I mentioned that I wanted to move strictly to Windows over Macintosh because of issues related to expense and getting all computers in my household to work nicely together.
That has proven to be more difficult that originally anticipated as I nearly lost my backup. Since then, things had been working fine until I realized that there is one program that there is no possible Windows equivalent for; MacFamilyTree. Every single Windows genealogy program has something that annoys me, and none have all the features that the Mac one does. So, I decided that I would run that on my Mac partition, only, I didn't leave enough room on that partition to really work with it. It was bad enough that in order to update Mac OS X I had to delete a bunch of programs to give enough space for the update which required 5 GB of free space.
This leads me to the point of my post today. I needed to change the partition sizes. How can I do that and still keep all my files/folders and programs in Windows? It turns out, the built in software for Windows does not allow this.
To start, my system was set up with a Mac partition taking up about 18 GB, Windows took up the remainder, which was about 212 GB. I wanted to give about 32 GB to Mac and drop Windows to about 200 GB.
Using the built in backup software in Windows, I created a disk image on an external drive, it was about 70 GB of data. Everything seemed fine. I even used Administrative Tools and Disk Management to "Shrink" the primary Windows partition before making the image (this does not actually change the partition information on the master boot record, it is internal to windows only and any other OS will still see windows at the original size of the partition).
Then I first tried to use my existing Mac OS X installation to remove the Bootcamp partition, created a new one at the newer size and tried to reinstall Windows again.
During the install, windows has repair options which allow you to select the backed up disk image to restore to. I tried that. What it did was unexpected. It reformatted my hard drive, but because Windows cannot read the Mac Extended Journaled partition, it formatted that as empty space, thus removing Mac OS X entirely from the computer. This might be great if you wanted that extra space back, although I have a feeling that certain information is housed on that partition that if rewritten as a FAT or NTFS partition it would damage the EFI boot information and render the computer unbootable, but that is just a guess and something I'm not willing to experiment with.
After discovering that, I knew I needed to go back. So, I reinstalled Mac OS X, effectively removing the new windows recovered installation. I started Bootcamp all over again and this time just installed windows without using the disk image backup.
After Windows was installed, I used the recovery tools to get my files back from the disk image.
Problem 1: I created a new user account when I installed Windows with a different name from my old account. The files and folders were created as they were in the old setup and thus created a new user folder. This means that the files are also secured for that user only and you would have to be an administrator to access them and to change their attributes to your new user. This was too much work for me.
Problem 2: this method did not restore my programs!
The only partial solution was to undo the restore from disk image, and create a new user with my old user name, log in to that user and ensure that user had administrative rights, then finally do the restore while logged in to that user. It brought back all my files and folders, but none of my personal settings were saved. I spent an evening getting most of my programs back and changing my desktop settings to my liking.
So, what have we learned here? For one, the windows disk image is just that. It is not a copy of certain partitions, it is a copy of your disk and only of those things Windows can read natively. Any file system on that disk that Windows cannot read will be replaced with empty disk space upon reimaging. And, using the disk image after the OS install to restore information only works for personal files and folders, no programs will be restored and neither will personal desktop settings.
For anyone out there who wants to change their partition size for a windows installation on a Mac using bootcamp, the built in software for both OS's is not good. Bootcamp can't resize a partition once it is created and neither can Apple's Disk Utility. Windows can resize, but it is virtual and not written to the MBR. I'm sure there are 3rd party programs that can do this, but don't rely on the built in OS programs to help you there.
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