On MacMini, the best way to backup a Windows partition is not using TrueImage

It took me a few days to figure out the best strategy to back up a Windows 7 Ultimate BootCamp OS partition, and the result was not what I expected in the beginning.


I started looking into the issue when slightly before my Windows 7 boot camp partition died.  It was just 2 weeks ago.  I got the MacOSX partition all set up, figure out how to back the partitions up using Disk Utility, and even figure out how to reliably create a partition image file (by using the OSX installation disc to boot up and then run Disk Director).  I even learned a few shortcuts during the process.

And then I then I realized something kind of shocking to me: the Linux based boot CD created by TrueImage was NOT working on MacMini.  It seems like only the WinPE version of Disk Director 11.0 can work on  MacMini.  For TrueImage boot up disc, all I got is the bootup screen and none of the keystroke and mouse movement was being sensed.  From there, I kept trying and trying all versions of TrueImage, and none of them create WinPE disc properly.  At the end, I found out that the supposed-to-be latest version TrueImage 2011 actually generate a bootup disc that MacMini and read.  But when I booted it up, TrueImage 2011 couldn't access the MacMini internal harddisk.

Finally I gave up using TrueImage to backup a partition.  Instead, I was using Mac Disk Utility to back the Windows 7 partition as a image file.  I haven't tried recovered it yet, but seriously I don't see why that will fail.