Mac – How to back up Windows 7 on Boot Camp to a Mac-formatted external drive

Yep, this is something that can happen, and there are two Apple articles to address it.

Boot Camp: iMac displays a black screen during installation of Windows 7 http://support.apple.com/kb/TS3173

• Download the autounattend.xml and updated graphics drivers

Boot Camp: Start up to black screen after installing Windows
http://support.apple.com/kb/TS2600

• Reset PRAM
• Reset SMC

You mentioned that you did already download a fix from Apple, so I am assuming you may have followed the first article already, and if that is the case there are some instructions floating around the net to try to resolve the graphics issues by removing an ATI driver pre-reboot.

• Run the Boot Camp Assistant in OS X as normal and create a partition when asked, then insert your Windows 7 disc to reboot and begin the process proper.
• Windows 7 requires the NTFS file system, so once in the installer just select your new partition (labelled BOOTCAMP), click on Drive options (Advanced) and choose to format it. Then select the newly formatted partition and continue.
• Windows 7 will begin installing, and once it gets almost to the bottom of its checklist, it’ll try to reboot. Now, if you leave it here, you’ll get so far and see the black screen. Any further attempts to reboot will bring you to the same dead end.
• Instead, restart and press a key to boot from the Windows 7 disc when prompted. Rather than running the installation again, choose the little option at the bottom to Repair your computer. Decline any suggestions that pop up until you see a list of options with Command Prompt at the bottom. Choose that option.
• At the Command Prompt, type DEL C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\DRIVERS\ATIKMDAG.SYS to delete the default ATI driver, then close the window and reboot.
• This time, Windows should successfully initialise a more appropriate display driver, allowing you into the desktop. From here insert your OS X disc to install the relevant hardware drivers as you normally would, then run Windows update to clear up any leftovers.

You should back up your Windows partition while booted into Windows, using Windows-compatible backup software, and you must backup to an external drive that is NTFS-formatted, whether it is over Ethernet, USB, FireWire or whatever else you can work out. Do not try to use a physical hard drive that has one partition formatted for Mac or Time Machine, and another partition formatted for NTFS. Use a completely separate hard drive.

Don't try to back your BootCamp Windows system up using Mac OS X outside Windows. You might figure out how to back up some files, but you will not be able to create a bootable "bare-metal restore" image, like those people in Windows-land call it.

Windows Vista and Windows 7 have a good built-in Backup utility that can make a full disk image for a full restore, but only to a hard drive that is NTFS-only. They can also do incremental/differential file backups in a separate procedure. And there are many third-party backup software solutions for Windows, such as Acronis.

Trust me, you will not want to try to do this using an Apple Time Capsule or a drive that has a partition that is formatted for Apple Time Machine. A couple of years ago I actually worked out a procedure for doing this using unsupported features on the Time Capsule, and I regretted it, because it interfered tremendously with my Mac Time Machine files when I needed to do a full restore on my Mac partition on my MacBook Pro.