Fixing (Severely botched) Partitioning?

A

Ashton

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Nov 13, 2004
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I tried about 20 different methods to install Windows 7 on my 2010 MBP and all failed (superdrive is broken and USB-stick boot doesnt really work on 2010 MBP, decided to just wait untill the new crop of MBPs comes out in Oct and upgrade to a Retina) so I'm left now with a 500gb HDD that is split 50-50 between OSX and non-functional Windows... My only real problem is that my OSX partition is a little cramped now, no file-system errors or anything on the OSX side...

Tried to use bootcamp assistant and it says it cant restore the disk to a single parition. I assume I could just go into recovery and erase everything, but I'd rather not lose all the data on my perfectly working OSX partition (never used Time Machine after my woe from Windows System Restore backing up viruses, but if it can be used to back up to an external drive then restore my system after recovery I'm willing to do it if there's not an easier way).

So, best program to fix the partitioning?
 
Ashton said:
(never used Time Machine after my woe from Windows System Restore backing up viruses, but if it can be used to back up to an external drive then restore my system after recovery I'm willing to do it if there's not an easier way).
Click to expand...

The Time Machine thing is pretty handy. Yes, it can save to an external drive (USB or Firewire). It has to be formatted in HFS+ though. What's very nice about it, is that it has it's own installer built-in to the backup. So you can boot FROM the Time Machine in case you have a blank hard drive installed.

I guess Time Machine would backup a virus. However, it does versioning, so if you had an idea of when you got the virus you could simply restore from a point before that.

Another somewhat useful thing about Time Machine is that it will lock files after a certain amount of time (I think 2 weeks is default). So you can't accidently make changes to something without verifying that you want to do that.

I like to tinker with my Mac's and Time Machine makes it very handy to replace hard drives or partitions and then still be able to end up with a perfectly working computer again.
 
westrock2000 said:
The Time Machine thing is pretty handy. Yes, it can save to an external drive (USB or Firewire). It has to be formatted in HFS+ though. What's very nice about it, is that it has it's own installer built-in to the backup. So you can boot FROM the Time Machine in case you have a blank hard drive installed.

I guess Time Machine would backup a virus. However, it does versioning, so if you had an idea of when you got the virus you could simply restore from a point before that.

Another somewhat useful thing about Time Machine is that it will lock files after a certain amount of time (I think 2 weeks is default). So you can't accidently make changes to something without verifying that you want to do that.

I like to tinker with my Mac's and Time Machine makes it very handy to replace hard drives or partitions and then still be able to end up with a perfectly working computer again.
Click to expand...

Interesting. Have you done this with a 2010mbp or earlier? From what I've read the USB-boot option doesn't fully work (hence why USB install of W7 is disabled) I'd like to know if I can USB-boot using a time-machine drive.

Also, can you use time-machine between different models? As I said sometime in the next 3-6 months or so I'm looking at upgrading and would love to be able to just plug in an external HDD and restore all my settings, programs, files, etc.
 
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