Creating a new schematic for an existing PCB in Altium

Question

I'm pretty new to Altium (I'm used to Eagle) but I've been given the task of cleaning up an existing project. The project was originally one schematic and one PCB that would serve as two parts of an assembly by chopping off a piece of the PCB and connecting the two together.

The recent change that was made is to make them separate PCB files with differing lengths but still mostly the same. Now, I didn't do this change but I am being tasked with creating the schematic for the new PCB and I'm not sure how to go about it.

I tried copying the schematic into a new file and updating the PCB to that schematic but it's giving me a bunch of errors and adding duplicates of footprints to the PCB.

Did I go about the right way? Is this a thing that can be done without completely redoing the schematic and PCB for the second board? If so, could you give me some guidance on how to proceed?

Answer 1

1. Step 1. Use the project packer to duplicate the whole project.
2. Step 2. Unzip it into a new folder. Check for errors. Make sure you can recompile the project, and then update links between PCB and schematic. Use import changes to generate and ECO and make sure they are synchronized.
3. Step 3. Edit the new project by deleting stuff from the schematic that you don't need. Recompile and update the PCB from the schematic.
4. Step 4. Repeat step 2 and 3 for the other project.

Warning: I am using altium 16. You are probably using a newer version. But presumably it still has the project packer and all the same concepts and workflow.