CCC and Boot Camp Windows Partitions

[NAYASA]

I plan on installing Boot Camp, but i want to partition & install on my external hard drive, but the installer only lets me do so on internal hard drives, so if i was on a tower Mac then i could take the drive out of the external case and mount it inside, but i am on a iMac. I'd rather install on my external drive as it is bigger, so i suppose i could install on my internal drive without anyone dying, but i would prefer to put it on the external, bigger drive, which is only otherwise used for backups, so i have about 90 GB of space on it that i won't use for anything else.

[BlackNGold]

sudo su -

umount /Volumes/Windows

dd if=/dev/disk0s3 of=winbackup.dmg

the "umount" command and "if=" option of dd should reference your windows partition. You can use the "df" command to determine the partition you need to reference. unmounting is suggested to ensure all files are closed.

the "of=" option of dd says to create an output file somewhere. Use the fully qualified path to the external disks when you define the output file and you should be gold. That'll be something like "/Volumes/My_Big_Disk/winback.dmg"

To restore the partition, use the "if=" option to reference the winbackup file and the "of=" to reference the target partition. (basically reversing the source and target of the command I listed above). Also, note that you'll be creating an output file the same size as the windows partition - exactly. There's no compression at all. "dd" copies 0's and 1's and doesn't care about what kind of filesystem the partition might contain.

You can restore a file created like this to an equal or larger sized partition, but smaller... well, that's not gonna work. On the up side, you can double click on the file to get to your stuff.

[Eaton]

To be more specific, I'm actually planning on installing Linux, apparently others have managed to get that to work.

I'm not talking about the installer on windows, I'm talking about the partitioner on the Boot Camp software, that you run before installing.