Blog de Joe Freeman

OWC and others recommend that you do a fresh installation when moving a Mac with Windows BootCamp to a larger drive.  That is probably a good idea. Sometimes you just decide to do things the hard way. This is what I did for my Macbook Air when I bought a larger SSD.  It had OS/X on the first partition and Windows 7 on the second partition. Backup your data. Create a Clozilla bootable thumb drive. Get an OWC drive with external case. Plug in the new drive in the external case. Boot Clonezilla from the thumb drive.  Clone the internal disk to the new, larger, external disk. Make an exact copy of the disk using Clonezilla. This exact copy will not make use of the full drive. Power off the machine Remove the old disk.  Install the new disk inside your machine. Boot into the mac OS on the disk you just installed. Move GPT bookkeeping data to the actual end of the disk. Download and use gdisk to copy the MBR/GPT info to the end of the new drive. You ma...

I foolishly decided to convert a Windows operating system drive from MBR partitioned to GPT partitioned. That conversion didn't go right. The boot portion of the drive was erased or destroyed. The partitions were still there and no data was destroyed.   I tried to convert the drive back to MBR.  That didn't work easier.  This is usually the point where you might start panicking. The cycle time is pretty long when you try and fix the boot portion of a physical disk.  There are continual physical machine restarts.  There is also risk that data will be lost while attempting to fix this. I wanted to attempt drive repair without risking destruction of data on the drive I was working on. In addition, I didn't want to work on this drive without access to the internet. My target laptop laptop has two bootable drives in it.  I realized that I could convert the trashed disk from Physical to Virtual using Paragon Drive Copy. Then I could hack on the virtual drive...