Acronis and other disk cloners in boot camp

[Stewman]

Here is an odd one, if anyone can shed some light! - I have Xp running in boot camp on my Mac mini. I installed Paragon Drive Copy to clone the windows partition which is 32 gig but the software see's the whole 180 gig which will of course include the osx part as well so i uninstalled it and tried Acronis and yeah guess what same thing again, How am i supposed to archive that to a 200gig firewire external why can't i just clone the 32gig. Why does it see just the hard drive as a whole and not recognize the partitions, windows doesn't know its in a partition? Thanks in advance anyone, Stewman

[sleepyhead]

I think it's because your disk uses GUID Partition Table (GPT) scheme and the particular cloning software you tried support MBR partition table scheme only.

See http://kb.acronis.com/content/2974
At the bottom of page it says: "Acronis True Image Echo and Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 support dynamic and GPT disks." So you'll need to get versions of Acronis (or Paragon) that support GPT.

There's an FAQ from Microsoft that explains GPT in detail:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/302873
In the FAQ, under "Why does the GUID Partition Table have a Protective MBR?" it explains why the disk is treated as one whole partition.

[Stewman]

thanks sleepyhead don't really understand windows disk stuf will try and find a disk imager that supports the thing you said, its ashame cos they were bothfre kind of. Stewman

[praneeth]

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