My GF was underwhelmed with Parallels so I managed to get hold of al the bits & pieces necessary to do the Boot Camp thing (despite being Tiger-based, ergo using the old ‘beta’ BootCamp). She now has:
on Internal HD (GUID partition scheme):
• disk0s2, HFS +, boots MacOS X 10.4.11
• disk0s3, NTFS, boots XP Pro SP2
on External FireWire HD (FDisk_partition_scheme says the Finder; Master Boot Record, says Disk Utility):
• disk1s1, NTFS, contains Retrospect “Duplicate” of disk0s3 41.5 GB
• disk1s2, NTFS, contains backup copies of all MP3 files from the big iPod 191.4 GB
on 2nd External FireWire HD (GUID partition scheme):
• disk2s2, HFS +, contains Retrospect “Duplicate” of disk0s2
She has both the MacOS and the Windows incarnation of Retrospect; the Mac version generates the backup on disk1s1, and it’s very definitely bootable. If the primary Mac boot volume goes toes-airward, we could boot from this backup and reverse-Retrospect the contents to an appropriate drive to restore from backup, pretty painless.
The Windows version of Retrospect is what generates the contents of disk1s2. The Windows “Startup Disk” control panel installed by Boot Camp does not show this backup as a viable option to boot from. (In fact, this control panel does not appear to be a ‘pick your startup volume’ thingie anyhow, so much as a ‘pick your OS type’ selector). So IF it were our goal to boot from the Windows BACKUP, that’s not where we’d make that selection.
The MacOS Preference Pane “Startup Disk”, a logical place to try next, is a bit confused by the presence of MacFUSE and the NTFS-3G file system, which lets the Mac write to as well as read from the NTFS volumes that are mounted. Since installing those, the Mac “Startup Disk” prefspane ony shows the two MacOS bootable volumes. The XP volumes don’t show up.
That leaves the open firmware on-the-fly selector. Holding down the option key after a reboot gives these choices:
Macintosh HD [i.e., disk0s2]
Mac Backup [i.e., disk1s1]
Windows [i.e., disk0s3]
This leaves me in doubt as to the bootability of the Windows backup. Why wouldn’t it be, though? I have used Retrospect for Windows to generate bootable backups before. Is it perhaps because it’s an external FireWire drive? In an emergency, is it likely that a physical swap of that external drive for the internal ATA would result in a Windows-bootable system? :smack: or, umm, is it likely that it would do so were it not for the fact that the external drive is a 3.5" while the little Mac Mini’s internal is a laptop-style 2.5" drive? OK so I’d still like to know the answer just for the sake of curiosity, but that’s not gong to help much if we ever need the backup for the major reason that people need backups…
OK, IF I were to boot in MacOS X instead (which it can do from either of two physical disks), and I happen to have a (blank empty) NTFS-formatted volume to restore it to, can the MAC version of Retrospect use its ‘Duplicate’ functionality to move all those files (back) to the bootable internal drive? Or are there flags and whatnots, akin to MacOS X permissions and ownership, that would not get set and therefore would cause it to fail to be bootable?
Hmm, OK, if the problem is that it is an external FireWire drive and the Mac Mini can’t boot XP from external FireWire (and/or XP can’t boot itself from external FireWire), would that physical drive do a better job of being bootable if it were in an external USB-2.0 housing?
Hey, getting Windows installed on this damn thing wasn’t exactly effortless. I’d like to avoid ever having to start from scratch. How does one attain a bootable backup of XP on this thing?