Backing up Mac niternal drive containing BootCamp partition

July 20, 2007 9:32 AM

Best way to backup an internal drive of a MacBook, containing a Boot Camp partition, to an external drive?

Internal drive is 160Gb. External is 250Gb disk with Firewire interface. Boot Camp partition was formatted as a 32GB FAT32 running XP. I was planning to use SuperDuper to duplicate the OS X partition into the external drive. Then boot from the external drive, and use Disk Utility to save the entire FAT32 partition onto a .dmg file on the external drive. Will this work? Is there a better way?

posted by jaimev to computers & internet (4 comments total)

There's no need to boot off the external drive to create an image of the FAT32 partition.

Partition your external drive into a 160GB partition to use for SuperDuper cloning -- yes that's bigger than you need but you may one day choose to remove the Windows partition -- and use the remainder for a partition to store the FAT32 image and whatever else you want to put on it. Now use SuperDuper to clone your Mac partition.

When that's done, open Disk Utility (in the /Applications/Utilities folder), select the FAT32 partition, and click the New Image button in the toolbar. Give it a name and save it to the extra partition.
posted by pmbuko at 11:24 AM on July 20, 2007

Look for an app called Carbon Copy Cloner. It will copy everything about the drive, partitions, permissions, etc. Awesome piece of software.
posted by Aversion Therapy at 1:39 PM on July 20, 2007

except it doesn't do FAT32.
posted by pmbuko at 1:57 PM on July 20, 2007

Connect and format the USB drive using Disk Utility (you'll need to use HFS+, since FAT32 doesn't support files over 4 GB). Then, insert your OS X install disc, reboot, and hold the C key while your maching boots. Select your language, then choose Disk Utility from the Utilities menu. Click on your laptop hard drive (not the partition, the actual, top-level drive), and then File->New->Disk Image from disk0... Tell it to store the image on your USB drive (you may need to mount it before doing any of this), and wait while it works its magic. Viola! The resulting DMG file will include all partitions (HFS+ and FAT), the partition table, and the MBR.
posted by TheNewWazoo at 4:08 PM on July 20, 2007