On my MacBook I have a Bootcamp installed partition for running Windowy-things (i.e playing Eve online) from an external drive. Feeling a little tight on space I ordered a 160Gb drive1 which should give a bit more room to fill my computer with yet more stuff. Copying the OS X part was going to be easy – I already have a program that can make bootable copies on any connected drive, XP was going to be a little trickier though, and no-one seems to have written an application to do the job. Fortunately, while consuming tea and cake2 I realised I had been looking too hard, and the solution may in fact, based on a few assumptions, be simple:

  • Windows is a bunch of files in a FAT32 partition
  • OS X can read and write to a FAT32 partition
  • OS X doesn’t care what the Windows files are and handily corals them in a single place

With these thoughts I hatched a plan, and cloned both my OS X install (with Superduper) and a copy of the XP files onto an external drive. The plan was simple and given that it would probably go down in flames, worth a try…

  • Drop in the new hard drive
  • Re-clone OS X back into the laptop
  • Repartion using Bootcamp again, this time a little more generously than 5Gb for XP (so I don’t have to run everything off a USB drive)
  • Use the Windows installer to format the partition to FAT32 then kill the install process
  • Recopy the XP files into the new partition within OS X
  • Hope

Results were, very surprisingly, seemingly 99.999% effective (I seem to end up with a notepad file open at boot with the end of of a shell script)… but b*ugger me sideways with a bargepole if that was not the least painful dealing with XP I have ever had…

  1. I was of course delivered a 120Gb UATA drive first time around ↑
  2. Any better way to think about things? ↑

Posted in MacBook | Tags: ,  | 1 Comment