Fusion can no longer use my bootcamp partition

[Guddler]

I guess I should have known I was courting with trouble by doing this but never mind!

Last night I decided to try out WinClone in advance of wanting to use it for real sometime later this month. The point here this time being that I will be carrying on using my original setup for a while yet.

First thing I did was convert my BC partition to NTFS from FAT32 using the command line in Windows. Then I ran WinClone, also selecting the option to shrink the partition ready to install on a different disk, or some similar wording. All went very well, the product worked exactly as advertised and it's how I will probably move my partition when the new MBP arrives.

Unfortunately this morning I've now hit a problem with the setup on the iMac. Running natively under Windows it is fine, it recreated the pagefile and everything went as expected. It initially did a disk check on startup but I just put this down to the process that had gone on and things are now fine. Fusion however is a different matter.

I went to start the partition up in Fusion and it told me the partition table had changed and I should remove the disk and re-add it to the virtual machine. Fair enough, the partition table had probably indeed changed. Rightly or wrongly, rather than removing the disk from the settings I figured it would probably be just as easy to delete the bootcamp folder from the application support directory and let Fusion pick bootcamp back up again.

Now I don't seem to be able to convince it to do it. It detects the partition and runs the dialogue that prepares the partition to run with Fusion but it always comes back and tells me that Windows wasn't shut down properly the last time even though it was. Just to be sure I've been back into Windows and shut down cleanly a few times. Any ideas how I can force this to go through?

I guess one option is to remove my bootcamp setup completely, use bootcamp assistant to recreate the partition and the put it back on again using the cloned copy but is there an easier way?

Thanks,

Martin.

[rcardona2k]

Please include the Boot Camp preprocessor logs from the instructions in

[Guddler]

Attached...

iMac, Early 2006, 2GB ram 250GB HDD, 256MB ATI X1600 - OSX 10.5.1, Fusion 1.1

Ta,

Martin.

[rcardona2k]

Sorry I'm not seeing the vmware.log attachment from the naos helper vm?

[Guddler]

Ok, I'll try attaching it again! It did upload it but I was wandering where it was meant to show up myself too

Hopefully, attached to this one. If it doesn't this time then let me know and I'll just stick it on my website for download.

Martin.

Doesn't look like it did it again. Should be available from here then instead: http://www.guddler.co.uk/vmware.log

[Guddler]

Okay, I don't know why Fusion was not able to work with the partition after WinClone had cloned it but the answer was fairly simple, painless and one of two options.

1) If you have the chance don't let WinClone modify the partition table. I presume this would prevent the problem in the first place but this is untested.

2) Once you have the problem simply use WinClone to restore your clone back onto the partition it came from, Fusion was then able to deal with the partition as per normal.

Actually, as I'm typing this I think I've just thought of the third. Doh!

I bet using the tool option within WinClone to expand the partition size back out probably would have solved the problem too. Oh well, never mind.

Just a couple of things to be wary of for anyone else going down the cloning route with their Windows setups.

Martin.

Shame I can't set my own answer as the correct one

[rcardona2k]

Thanks for the info - I'm sure it will be helpful to someone here. I couldn't see anything obvious in your log above.

[todivefor]

Guddler,

Can you covert a FAT32 partition to NTFS without losing any data? If so, what command line command? I have done this with Partition Magic in the past. Little leary trying it on my BC partition.

Thank you.

[Guddler]

Yes, sure!

If running XP, open a command prompt and type "convert c: /fs:ntfs" (i'm assuming C: is the partition you wish to convert).

You will get a couple of warning, the exact text of which I forget right now but the gist of it is that it cannot be done on the currently active boot partition but the OS will just schedule it to be done on the next reboot.

If you're not running XP then check the format of the convert command with "convert /?" or "help convert"

Martin.

[todivefor]

Martin,

Thanks.Great!

Peter