I thought I’d share some failures with the world – this might save someone some headache and hassle, who knows.
Here’s the deal: I had Windows Vista installed on a BootCamp partition on my MacBook Pro. I am pretty religous about backups, and I had made a number of consecutive backups – some recent ones made with Acronis True Image Home, which I purchased recently, and some with Image For Windows, which I had been using before that.
For the Mac side of things, I use Carbon Copy Cloner – Carbon Copy Cloner and SuperDuper! are two ‘imaging’ softwares for Mac, and to me the single most important feature they have is their ‘restore’ functionality – there is none!
You don’t need restore – the backups you make with those two programs are ‘good to go’: they are bootable, as-is, so they slot right in as a replacement of the broken drive.
Most backup softwares, especially on PC, are good at making backups, but in my experience, they stink at restoring: it’s an endless hassle of fiddling with boot disks, partition tables, formats and so on. If a PC drive dies on me, I know from experience that it’ll take me 2-3 days to rebuild the system back to usability. If a Mac drive dies on me, I can be back in business in an hour or so.
The reason why I switched to Acronis True Image Home is that I was hoping it would give me some functionality somewhat close to what Carbon Copy Cloner does – i.e. in case of disaster, I was hoping to reboot off some CD, put in the backup, and have it restore the hard drive to its original self.
So, disaster struck, and the 500GB hard drive in my trusty MacBook Pro gave up – click-click-click… forever, just the day before I had to leave overseas. The drive was partitioned into one 320GB partition for Mac, and then the remainder used as a BootCamp with Vista.
Not to worry – I simply opened the machine, and replaced the internal hard drive with the backup drive I made with Carbon Copy Cloner. Within the hour I was back in business with all my Mac stuff back where it was supposed to go, except for the changes of the last few days. Those remaining files I got off my Time Machine. Saved!
However, the BootCamp partition was a different story; I did not look into it immediately, as I had no immediate need for it. A few months go by, and a few days ago, I decided to try and rebuild my BootCamp setup – easy peasy, I had backups aplenty, right?
Wrong, it turned out. The backup drive had an empty, unused Mac partition the same size as my BootCamp setup – the idea being that when ‘restore time’ came around I would repurpose that partition as ‘BootCamp’ and tell Acronis to put the BootCamp stuff there.
But it turned out I could find no easy way to tell the Mac that I wanted to ‘convert’ the Mac partition for use by BootCamp/Windows. The BootCamp utility insists on starting from one big Mac-only partition, and then shrinking it down to allow room for a BootCamp partition.
The way I got around that was by Carbon Copy cloning all my stuff off the Mac, repartition the drive as a single, large partition, then Carbon Copy cloning all my stuff back onto the Mac. Total time needed for this little back-and-forth escapade: about 12 hours. Great.
Morale: don’t ‘save’ room for a BootCamp partition on your clone-to backup drive. Instead, make your backup drive one big Mac partition.
Ok, that was one hard lesson. I now told the BootCamp utility to get me going with BootCamp. Booted into Windows, installed a basic copy of Vista. Installed the BootCamp drivers. Didn’t work. Grmm. After some head-scratching I realized I’d used the BootCamp drivers from a generic Mac OS X install disk – instead, I should have used the Mac OS X install disk that came with the MacBook Pro.
Morale: use your Mac’s install disk to install the BootCamp drivers on Windows.
Onwards, ever onwards. I now installed Acronis into Vista, and got to a point where I was ready to restore my BootCamp partition: I made an Acronis boot disk on a CD, rebooted the Mac off the Acronis boot disk, and… no way to do the restore: the Acronis software simply has no idea how to read the partition tables on my Mac’s drive, and it simply told me to go away. Bummer.
Not to be deterred – I rebooted my Mac under Mac OS X, started VMware Fusion, and ‘grabbed’ the BootCamp partition as a virtual machine.
A VMware-fusion-ed BootCamp has a lot of emulated hardware and so, so I reckoned Acronis might work this time around. I plunked in the Acronis boot disk, fired up BootCamp under VMware Fusion, and hit the F2 key as soon as the screen flickered (so I could get into the virtual machine’s BIOS settings). In the BIOS screen I changed the boot order to boot off CD instead of from the internal hard disk.
Ok – we’re booting off the Acronis CD – great! It recognizes the hard drive – great! It recognizes my backups – great!
Oh, wait – that is way too much success in one go – so I was punished, in a cruel and painful way.
Turns out the Acronis boot disk has its own mouse driver software, and it’s almost impossible to use in a VMware Fusion virtual machine – you can only move the big yellow mouse cursor a wee bit left or right, and then it jumps somewhere else. The mouse cursor had a mind of its own, and I had very little control over its movement.
To make matters even more frustrating, the Acronis software does have some keyboard navigation – but it is not consistent. Some things can only be clicked with the mouse – no keyboard shortcut to it. With persistence, luck, pounding of the keyboard, and lots of frantic mouse skating, I managed to occasionally get the mouse cursor positioned over a button I needed to click.
So, I slowly, slowly waded through the selection screens until I came to a point where I needed to tell it what partition to restore to – and there things locked up. Any further keystroke or mouse click would make the virtual PC emit beeps. Nothing could make it budge. Beep beeperdebeep beep. Grrr.
So, I redid the whole procedure – rebooted, spent another hour flapping my mouse around to get to the same point. Same phenomenon: no way to get past that screen. Total time lost: at least 4 hours. I gave up; Acronis was not going to do it. It’s probably great for ‘real’ PC’s but it is useless with BootCamp.
Morale: don’t bet your life on Acronis True Image Home when you use BootCamp.
All was not lost – I still had some older backups made with Image For Windows. Image For Windows is not good-looking, and it is downright clunky at times – but this thing has a lot of knowledge and experience packed into it. The procedure was similar to Acronis: make a boot CD, boot VMware Fusion off it, connect backup drive.
This time around, it was smooth sailing: the software picked up the NTFS-formatted USB backup drive, and so on, and the restore was underway! … still underway … still underway. About 24 hours!! later, the restore was finally complete – man, that was incredibly s-l-o-w. But it worked! Or did it?
I rebooted BootCamp in VMware fusion – it thought about it long, and hard, and eventually booted right up. We’re in business, we’re in business!
Then I tried rebooting straight off the BootCamp drive. Shattered dreams – some message like ‘a bootable drive cannot be found’. Tried rebooting off a Vista boot disk and doing all kinds of repairs – to no avail; it never saw the hard disk partition. Tried rebooting Bootcamp in VMware Fusion: nope. Dead as a dodo.
I gave up there – I’d been at it for days!
Later on, when the frustration has worn off a bit, I’ll reinstall BootCamp from scratch and forget about the backups – it might be possible to restore them, but it’s just too hard!
Morale: backup just the data stored under BootCamp and be prepared to reinstall Windows under BootCamp from scratch after a disaster, and then pour the data back in after rebuilding the PC side.
So, that’s my sorry tale – I hope this helps someone else avoid the mistakes I’ve made!
Cheers,
Kris