Saturday, January 3, 2015

macos - How to make a bootable clone of a Boot Camp partition?

I have an old Boot Camp installation of Win XP on an old iMac (2006). I can boot into either Mac OS or Win XP. I cloned the Win XP partition to a USB drive using the dd command in Terminal. This is supposed to result in a byte-for-byte copy.


I'd like to boot my MacBook Pro from this drive. Although all the contents of the Win XP partition seem to be present, I can't boot from the USB drive. Mac OS doesn't recognize it as a bootable drive and it isn't shown as a choice when restarting with the option key held down.


I installed the rEFInd boot manager as suggested here but that didn't help, although I am not exactly clear about what to do to get rEFInd to "sync my GPT and PMBR".


I also used Paragon Hard Disk Manager and ran all the repairs suggested for a Boot Camp partition. Still nothing. rEFInd sees the Windows system and presents it as an option, but choosing it gives a message saying "No bootable devices found..."


This prof was able to do this by first creating a Boot Camp partition with Boot Camp Assistant and then cloning the partition onto it using dd in the command line. My version of BCA will only install back to Win 7 and asks for the install disk before partitioning the target drive, so that's not an option. I'm not sure whether I could find an older version of BCA, and get that to work.


So I thought I'd ask the question here: Isn't there some simple way to make a partition bootable? The partition is formatted as Fat32. Thanks in advance.

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