Boot from Mac Bootcamp

[bhwong]

I have a physical HDD from my spoiled Macmini containing bootcamp partition. How do I make a vmfs file from the bootcamp partition and create a VM that boot from it? I'm able to see this partition from Windows Host.

[mpack]

Let me understand this correctly: you want to rescue a Windows (10?) Bootcamp partition from a failed Mac Mini, is that correct?

And what is a "vmfs" file? Do you mean a VMDK?

Anyway it would be quite a task to create a bootable Win10 VM from a Bootcamp partition. I'm assuming you would be creating a GPT partition, so you'd need to replace the partition maps (both of them) and the boot manager partition. This would be a research project, not something I'd care to offer too many opinions about right now.

Far simpler would be to map the Bootcamp partition to a raw disk, and then recover any files you care about. Then install Win10 from scratch in a VM: you may need a new Win10 license, since I'm not sure how the Bootcamp image was licensed.

[mpack]

Thought: another thing that might be worth trying is to clone a working Win10 VM, and then overwrite the system image with the Bootcamp one. There may still be boot issues: I don't know what the boot manager looks for in the OS partition. Might be worth trying though. Macrium should be able to "restore" partitions.

[bhwong]

yes you are right. it's vmdk, not vmfs.

Just want to recover the old Windows environment (relive personalise sound, icons and wallpaper etc, and all the old classic apps). This is just out of curiosity and mainly for nostalgia reason (especially when one get older! lol), as I can easily recover any file I care about thru the USB connection without using Virtualbox. I have multiple backups of my files anyway.

It was fun to relive the old times when I managed to recover the Mac partition in Virtualbox. But surprisingly, the bootcamp partition appear to be more challenging.

Your suggestion to use existing Windows VM and replace the Windows partition sound workable. I will figure out how this is done with Macrium first and give it a try. Thanks for the idea!

[bhwong]

macrium.png (44.82 KiB) Viewed 1260 times

It's disappointing to find out that Macrium is so restrictive that it is unable to restore a "secondary" partition into a "primary" partition. In fact, it cannot even restore the backed up 93.26GB partition into another partition of same or even bigger capacity, as it insisted that the destination must be as big as the source disk capacity of 465.76GB, despite I'm merely trying to restore a partition less than 100GB.

[mpack]

This is the VirtualBox forum, not the Macrium forum, but I personally find Macrium to be pretty good at what it does, and being free doesn't hurt either. By all means find a tool that suits you better.

That said, I'm pretty sure also that I have used the free version of Macrium to backup disk images of different sizes, and it adjusted the partitions sizes automatically when restoring onto a target PC. Of course I would expect it to complain if the target was not safely larger than the space needed by the filesystem.

[bhwong]

I'm just letting you know the recommended tool is unable to work as expected. And I'm using the trial version of the workstation version, not the free one. It's also quite surprising that it insisted a 500GB space just to restore a 100GB filesystem. Personally, I find Acronis to be more flexible. It can even restore to a smaller capacity destination. If the source has only 50GB of data, it can even restore to a 60GB destination despite using a 100GB filesystem.

Cheers.

[mpack]

I used to use Acronis, more recently I find it to be bloatware. But I don't hold a brief for either app.

As I already said, I have personally used Macrium Free (I can't comment in trial versions I've never used) to move a disk image from a large disk to a smaller one, and from MBR to GPT, so from my POV it has done everything I ever needed. It can't squeeze naked partitions? Unfortunate but hardly terminal. You can do it yourself before imaging the disk, or you can restore the entire disk to a temp VM and reduce the partition size there.

Or if you prefer Acronis and it can squeeze naked partitions then - go for it!