August 16, 2009
New Mac, and cloning BootCamp XP
Because one of our children needs a new computer, I’ve ordered a brand new 15″ MacBook Pro … for myself. Our child will get my current MacBook 13″. Don’t look at me like that! I’m more of a power user than our child is. And I’m older. Also, I’m paying for it. But mainly it’s a totally rational decision that happens to work out in my favor.
I know that setting up the new Mac will be simple. I’ll plug my old one into the new one (I’m getting a firewire cable that’s 400 on one and 800 on the other, and if that doesn’t work, I’ll connect through the ethernet ports) and the new Mac will suck the life force (= my user directories ‘n’ stuff) out of the old one.
What will really take some time is rebuilding my Bootcamp Windows XP partition: Reinstall XP, and reinstall the few apps I use. (I am still using Microsoft Money, waiting for the new version of Quicken for the Mac, which keeps getting postponed.) I’d much rather clone the old Bootcamp partition onto the new machine. So, I looked around and found Bart PE and YouTube instructions for burning a Bart PE boot disk. I believe I now have to make a disk image of my current Windows partition, save it onto a USB hard drive, and then, well, I don’t exactly know, but I’ll figure it out. Maybe.
