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Grow your partition with a restore

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Shhhh. Don't tell anybody but my work laptop is a Macbook Pro. You see we bought a few of them for our test lab to ensure that Macs work great with Windows Home Server's centralized storage (they do).

Once testing was done these pretty laptops were just sitting in the lab unused. I had heard that Apple had released something called "Boot Camp" that would let you run Windows Vista on a Macbook Pro. I figure it was worth giving it a try...

Turns out the Macbook Pro makes a pretty good Vista laptop. Apple's Windows Vista drivers appear solid and it's basically just a well engineered x86 laptop. Mine looks really nice with a big "Windows Home Server" sticker on the cover :-).  I've been using it pretty steadily for a few months, however, when I first set it up I didn't expect to use it long (I was just playing around) so I used the default partition size suggested by Boot Camp for my Vista partition (30GB I believe).

After a month or so of use, I found this was not big enough. I was down to just 1-2GB free. How to shrink the Mac partition and grow the Vista partition...?

Windows Home Server to the rescue. See, Windows Home Server's computer restore capability can restore to a larger hard drive (or partition) than the original. So here's what I did:

  1. This morning I did a "Backup Now" on the Mac to make sure I had everything backed up to my Windows Home Server at work (I have a mini-home network in my office). Took about 4 minutes.
  2. I rebooted the Mac into the Mac OS.  I floundered around (I find many Macisms counter-intuitive...just the way I'm wired I guess) and found how to delete the Vista disk partition.
  3. I re-ran the Boot Camp tool. It lets you specify how big you want the two partitions. I told it to make my Windows partition 70GB (30 for Mac OS).
  4. I inserted my Windows Home Server Computer Restore CD and rebooted, holding down the Alt (command key in Apple terms).  This let me choose to boot the PC...er...Mac from the CD.
  5. When the Restore CD booted I told it which backup to use (the manual backup I had done 20 minutes earlier was the default so I didn't really need to do anything but press "Next"). I then confirmed that I wanted to restore the "30.3GB C: backup" to the "70GB C: drive".
  6. About 30 minutes later the machine rebooted and I was back in Vista with a 70GB C: drive and 30GB+ of free space.

I did this same routine a few months ago at home when I upgraded my desktop machine with a larger hard disk, so it's useful for that scenario too.

Moral of the story? Windows Home Server Computer Restore is a great tool for dealing with ever changing hard disk sizes. Oh, and the Mac is a pretty nice Windows Vista PC.

-cek

P.S. Remember, you can find a copy of Windows Home Server Reviewer's Guide here. It provides a great overview of what the product does and how it works.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    Ask Engadget has a question from Tony ; what's the best easy, efficient NAS-type device? I know exactly

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    Next step, allow automated backups and then restores of any OS using our trusty WHS :)

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    Any hopes of getting the reverse feature?  Last night I tried to swap out a 500 Gig drive for an 80 because I wanted to put the 500 in a different machine.  WHS would not let me restore because it had an image size for the larger drive, even though only about 30 gig was really used.  I was forced to revert to Ghost since it supports downsizing.  I was disappointed as this was my first attempt to use the restore feature.