Xster.net » Bootcamp

Moving Bootcamp Partition to New Drive

xiao — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 06:47:31 +0000

I bought a new hard drive. My Windows setup already had extensive amount of software and configurations on it that I didn’t want to remake. It worked well, which was rare, so I wanted to keep it.

Winclone is an excellent free tool that lets you do just that! Unfortunately there wasn’t much confirmation on the inter-web that it has been done with Snow Leopard and Windows 7 64-bit. So I tried just that and it worked flawlessly!

Get the software from the website
Go in preferences, back up to dmg but uncompressed. Remove the pagefile.sys and keep BCD and boot.ini checkboxes
Select your bootcamp drive as source and save image to an external hard drive
Put in your new drive and get your OS X working
Use the bootcamp assistant to make a new bootcamp partition of whichever size you want
Get Winclone again, go to restore, select your previous image and your new partition to restore to
Boot! The disk check might take a while…

Windows 7 Spooler Continuously Stops on Every Print Action

xiao — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 18:42:55 +0000

Spooler simply stops every time you try to print or add a printer or something? You can keep restarting it but will never be able to print something? I won’t pretend to know your problem since it depends on potentially so many things but if you have a MacBook, one thing worth investigating is have you been running VMWare Fusion? The ThinPrint drivers of the VMWare Tools seem to be able to cause this problem when you run the same machine in BootCamp mode. Unfortunately, you can’t just uninstall it. Uninstalling VMWare Tools from inside virtual mode seems to solve this problem

Empty Home Directory in Windows Using Boot Camp 3.0

xiao — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 22:29:47 +0000

Just got Snow Leopard and installed Boot Camp 3.0 on Windows? Boot Camp 3.0 is definitely a well welcomed update. The trackpad works much better now with 2 finger tap for secondary click, it finally works like in OS X. Even better, you can now access HFS+ without third party apps in Windows. Definitely nice for Windows 7 x64 users that MacDrive doesn’t even support. But one problem that seems to trouble people in the forums is that navigating to /Users/[yourname] in Windows shows an empty folder. You can’t access your music or pictures or anything from Windows.

One possibility is the presence of a .Xauthority file in your $HOME directory. Delete the file and you may access your home directory in Windows. Remember that running X11 will recreate the file. Delete it again.

To automate the whole process, consider creating a script that lets you boot into Windows worry free.

tell application "Finder"
	if exists file "~/.Xauthority" then
		delete file "~/.Xauthority"
	end if
end tell
do shell script "bless -mount /Volumes/[your Windows device]/ -legacy -setBoot -nextonly" with administrator privileges
do shell script "shutdown -r now" with administrator privileges

Put this in AppleScript editor and save it as a .app to make it executable. You can manpage the bless command for more options. You can also change the icon like any other app. At that point, you can invoke this via QuickSilver and a GUI dialog will prompt you for password.

It’s also possible that there are no .Xauthority files in the subdirectories so simply type in explorer the subdirectories to access them directly. ie: D:/Users/[you]/Desktop