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I want to partition a 750gb hard drive on my mac so I can run windows 7 on one partition and mac os on the other. I have a 160gb windows drive that I want to clone and install on my mac. How do I do that?
This get tricky as your not really running Windows alone here. If your were you would use a Windows cloning app. Here you can’t as these apps go down to the file system block level (true cloning vs imaging). Look for a Mac app that can do FAT32/NTFS file systems or use a Windows backup or file imaging program and not try to clone. You could also use a syncing program to copy over to a network volume on to your own file server (or internet backup type of service - iCloud)
In my shop I use apps by Paragon Software. It will do NTFS/Mac/Linux, from partitioning, cloning drives, backups and even make bootable recovery images of your OS. Worth taking a look. I would use OS/X install and set it up to dual boot, one partition for OS/X and the other for windows. It should create a small partition for the boot manager so you can select which partition to boot to OS/X or Windows. Once you have that set up, then use Paragon to image your other drive over to the Windows partition. Note, however, if you pulled that Windows drive from a PC, it may take it some time (if it loads) to find the new drivers, etc, to match the hardware on your mac.
Larry - Don’t forget to setup your Windows partition within Apples BootCamp application before installing Windows and your Windows apps & data. Also, make sure to make a good backup of your current Mac volume before you start altering the partitions. You may want to think about getting a larger drive to swap out with your current one. Then put your current HD into an external case. This gives you a clean slate to configure your HD for OS-X, BootCamp & Windows with plenty of space for apps & data for both. Your other option here is using a virtual machine (VM) to run windows in using VMware Fusion or Parallels Desktop. These run within Mac OS-X as such you don’t need to create a FAT or NTFS partition instead they create a storage drawer within your current Mac volume to hold your windows apps & data. Heres a good rundown on the differences Best VM for Mac
