Partition Manager 10 and Boot Camp Win7 partition

Hi All,

PM10 Personal appears to recognise the Boot Camp (BC) partition on my MacBook.

I would like to able to clone my BC partition, wipe it clean, resize and restore it. Is this possible using PM10 Personal? Am I correct in saying that PM10 supports the hybrid BC GPT/MBR partitioning? I understand PM10 will resize the partition without wiping the data clean, but I would like to have a cloned backup for the worst case scenario of the repartitioning failing.

Is PM10 all I need to achieve this?

Many thanks,

samberl789

 

Hello samberl789,

I understand you need to have a backup of BootCamp for other reasons. PM 10 Personal will do that with the simple backup wizard. Now, you've mentioned you need to resize your bootcamp partition. Are you planning to make it bigger or smaller?

I assume your two scenarios are to either make the Mac OS partition bigger and Windows smaller, or vice versa.

We currently have a software call "Camptune" in pre-release FREE to try. Very simple utility redistribute space between Mac OS and bootcamp.

If you still plan to use PM 10, we can only shrink the bootcamp partition and expand the HFS (Mac OS) partition. The opposite cannot be done, since PM does not natively support HFS partition to shrink.

 

Hello Paragon_Tommy. I have a similar requirement to samberl789, except that I won't need to resize the Windows (Boot Camp) partition. I simply need to be able to back it up safely and occasionally restore a previous backup. I'm a long standing user of Drive Backup and have been doing this successfully for many years on a conventional PC. The problems are not to do with Drive Backup, or any Paragon product (up until now I've have every confidence in them). The problems are more to do with their compatibility with Apple's Boot Camp.

i.e.

After I bought my Mac (a couple of months ago) I quickly realised that Boot Camp is a remarkably fragile utility. Making even minor changes to the Boot Camp partition can render it "invisible" at start-up. For example, resizing the partition will subsequently make it unbootable (obviously that wouldn't be much good for samberl789). But even something as simple as changing the Windows volume name can render it invisible to Boot Camp (and therefore unbootable). I understand your confidence in Paragon's product range but have they been properly tested with Boot Camp? For example, I'm 100% confident that Drive Backup could physically restore an old Boot Camp partition - but I'm not at all confident that Boot Camp itself would carry on working after the restore. My own experience suggests that Drive backup and Macs are simply not compatible - see this thread (especially post #3).

Getting off the subject of Drive Baclup, I noticed that you now have a couple of other products currently in Beta (Snapshot and CampTune). What would you recommend for someone with my requirement (compressed backup / safe restore / no resizing needed / must NOT break Boot Camp) ?

 

From what I understand, if you are performing a backup of your system, the original partition(s) and system will not be modified and shouldn't affect your boot-camp.

In your experience with Boot-camp, whenever your BC was modified and rendered 'invisible', did you have to reinstall BC or used a repair CD. At the very least, we can restore your data and partitions back in place, and then use a boot-camp CD to 'repair' the system back to its bootable self.

 

Thanks Tommy. It isn't the backup that's causing the problem - it's the restore. In fact, since my original post I've realised that any partitions created by DB10 are just totally invisible to OS-X. In fact I've begun to wonder if DB10 is creating MBR style partitions instead of GPT partitions.

One reason I think that is that DB10 seems to be limited to only 4 primary partitions. 4 is the limit of the old MBR partitioning strategy. GPT doesn't have such a limit. But let's say I was to create 3 partitions using some kind of OS-X partitioning utility. And for the sake of argument we'll assume that each partition takes up 10 percent of the drive's available space and that one of them contains the Windows 'Boot Camp' partition (so that I can install and run DB10).

At first, DB10 will agree with OS-X that there are 3 partitions and that together, they take up 30 percent of the available space with 70 percent still free. But if I now create a fourth partition (this time using DB10) Windows will be able to see the new partition but OS-X won't.

Now let's say that I delete the fourth partition and re-create it (this time using a Mac partitioning utility). Next time I boot into Windows, DB10 will agree that the drive now contains 4 partitions and that 60 percent of it is still free space - but crucially, DB10 will not be able to create further partitions. DB10 thinks that the drive already has its maximum of four.

All this leads me to think that DB10 is capable of reading a GPT partition table but it can only write to MBR.

To save duplication, here's another thread that I started which shows the actual layout of my partition table and how DB10 and OS-X disagree about it.