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Copy bootcamp partition from MBP to Mac Pro?

Sharky II

Sharky II

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jan 6, 2004
986
361
United Kingdom
Hi

I have a MBP 2010 with a small Bootcamp partition with Windows 7 32-bit on it.

Can i make a partition on my Mac Pro (2008, 8 x 2.8ghz), and clone the windows partition to it, and run it happily?

I need to do some Windows-only BOINC number crunching that would take advantage of the extra cores.

Thanks!
 
I'm not sure. I do know that you can't just make a partition for bootcamp; the bootcamp assistant has to do that or else it won't recognize it.

I partitioned drive 4 in my MacPro for legacy stuff and bootcamp, but I can't assign the partition in bootcamp assistant: it wants to do the partitioning itself.
 
I would say it most likely would not work, first of all the hardware between the two systems is different, so different boot camp drivers, Windows would probably blue screen upon boot up on your MP if you cloned the installation from your MBP.
 
Usually the Windows partition will fail to "use" the correct drivers on a different Mac.

The Windows OS will probably boot but the drivers will probably fail to load.

Un-installing and re-installing the Apple Boot Camp software might help, but more often than not you'll have to reassign the hardware in the Device Manager.

I have seen this issue with trying to use a pre-installed MacBook Windows (XP and 7) installation on different MacBooks.

It was quicker to re-install the whole Windows OS...
 
Possible, but Windows Activation will scream bloody murder since it's being moved to different hardware.
 
If you can boot to the windows dvd, you may be able to run a sort of repair install on top of it to get the drivers in line and then run the bootcamp dvd to finish it up.
 
Uninstall the graphics card driver and any other hardware listed (through Windows control panel). Then clone the partition as above. You might want to save a clone of the original before removing the drivers.

If you are lucky enough to boot up, reinstall the Apple drivers.
 
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