Windows – How to restore a Windows 7 DMG file to Boot Camp (and make it bootable)

bootbootcampdisk-utilitydmgwindows

My iMac's HD died last week, and so I was unable to access OS X (I had a Time Machine backup of it though). Fortunately I was able to boot into the Recovery HD and use Disk Utility to backup Boot Camp to a DMG file on an external drive before I lost that forever.

So, now I have a DMG file containing Windows 7. From what I understand, it's much more difficult to restore Windows Vista/7 than it is to restore Windows XP because the boot method has gotten more complex.

However, could someone point me in the right direction in order to restore a Windows 7 DMG file to Boot Camp, and of course make it bootable? I already tried the method shown here, which is quoted at a lot of places, but it definitely only works with WinXP and nothing newer.

Thanks in advance!

Best Answer

Try this variation on what its stated there:

  1. Run bootcamp to allocate the space 2-
  2. Install W7
  3. Go back to OSX (Install REFIT or similar as bootmanager (optional))
  4. Restore your DMG image over the W7 partition

With this you dont need the fdisk commands as bootcamp should mark the partition as active (bootable).

This SHOULD work.

The problem with the linked page process is that w7 (just as osx) is actually in 2 partitions, a small boot one and a large with the OS, your DMG only contains the OS partition.

Related Question