Winclone 6 2 – Clone Your Boot Camp Partition Drive

Winclone 6 2 – Clone Your Boot Camp Partition Drive Windows 7
Winclone 6 2 – Clone Your Boot Camp Partition Drive Mac
Winclone 6 2 – Clone Your Boot Camp Partition Drives

Introduction

The focus of this document is on the process of migrating an existing Windows 10 Boot Camp partition from the internal drive to a bootable external drive using Winclone 7.

Storage and Migration Scenarios for Windows 10 using Winclone 7

Winclone is probably the simplest and most reliable way to create a backup for your Windows Boot Camp partition. Just clone the partition — complete with all its settings and content — and you. Launch Winclone. If both Macs are on the network, the Source Mac should appear in the Sources column. Click on the Source Mac to select. If you need to create a Boot Camp partition, please see the help document 'Creating a Boot Camp Partition'.

If you are restoring a Winclone 6 image on a Mac that does not currently have a Boot Camp partition, you can use Disk Utility on macOS to create one. First, open Disk Utility in your Utilities folder (located in your Application Folder). Select the Disk as shown above, and click the partition button. Features: Clone Windows 7 (64-bit only) or 8.1 with ease. Clone to your Boot Camp partition either on a separate drive or on the same that contains your OS X partition. Creates image documents that can be stored on any media and double-clicked to open in Winclone. Verbose logging so you know what is going on. Built on the open source ntfstools.

Migrate Boot Camp from internal to external bootable drive
Run multiple bootable Windows 10 partitions on internal Intel Mac drive
Run multiple bootable Windows 10 partitions on external drive attached to Intel Mac
Migrate Windows 10 from a PC to Intel Mac
Migrate Windows 10 from Boot Camp to a PC that supports EFI mode
Create Winclone image of a Windows 10 PC drive
Restore a Windows 10 Winclone image to a PC drive for use in a PC that supports EFI mode

Requirements

In order to move your Bootcamp partition from your Mac to an external drive, it must meet the following requirements:

Intel Based Mac with EFI version 2 or greater (see http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1237)
USB or Thunderbolt external drive (USB flash drives not supported)
Bootcamp partition with Windows 10 or later

All procedures outlined have been tested on Windows 10 1803 (October Update).

The following Mac models were tested with the procedure:

MacBook Pro (2018)
MacBook Air (13-inch, Mid 2011), 10.13.5, MacBook Air 4,2
Mac Mini (Mid 2014)
iMac (27-inch, Late 2012), 10.14, iMac 13,2
Mac Mini (Mid 2011), 10.13.4, Mac Mini 5,1 (legacy)
MacBook (12-inch, Early 2015)
MacBook Air (13-inch, Mid 2011), 10.13.5 (legacy)
iMac (Retina 5k, 27”, Late 2015), 10.13.6, iMac 17,1

The following external USB-C hard drives where used:

Both external SSD were connected via a USB-C to USB-C cable, or USB-C to USB-A depending on ports available on the Mac.

Prepare External Drive in macOS using Disk Utility

Before migrating Windows 10 Boot Camp to a bootable external drive, the drive must be formatted with the GUID partition scheme and partitioned with an ExFAT partition. Keep in mind that this process will erase all existing data on the external drive, so make sure to back up any critical data elsewhere before proceeding.

Attach the external drive and open Disk Utility in the Utilities folder.

Select the external drive in the left side column. At the bottom of the Disk Utility window will be information about the disk. If the Partition Map is already set as “GUID Partition Table” you may skip to the section below “Add Partition.”

Create GUID Partition Table

Under the view menu in Disk Utility, select “Show All Devices”

Make sure the external drive (and not the volume) is selected.
Click the erase button in the toolbar. If you do not see the Scheme option, verify that the disk is selected in the left hand column and not a partition.
Give the volume a name, format as ExFAT (this will be changed during migration to NTFS), and GUID Partition Map for Scheme.

THIS WILL ERASE THE ENTIRE SELECTED DISK! Click Erase if you are sure.

Add Partition

After the disk has a GUID Partition table, you can leave it as a single ExFAT partition or add other partitions. If the external drive has a Mac (HFS+) partition, you can use Disk Utility to create a ExFAT partition from some of the free space from the Mac partition. To do so:

Select the Mac Partition and click “+”
Drag the size handle to make the size you want
Give the partition a name and select ExFAT as the Format.

A Note About File System Formats

The partition on the external drive was created as ExFAT because Disk Utility cannot natively create NTFS formatted partitions. Winclone can select destinations as ExFAT and will overwrite the ExFAT format during the migration and the result will be an NTFS formatted Windows file system.

Prepare the Boot Camp Partition

To successfully migrate the Boot Camp partition from the internal volume to an external volume, it is recommended that you prepare Windows with Sysprep prior to booting to the migrated copy of Windows on the external drive. Since Sysprep can fail and leave the Windows install in an unknown state, it is also recommended that you create a Winclone image of the Windows install on the internal partition prior to running Sysprep. Alternatively, you can run Sysprep after restore from the external volume in a Virtual Machine such as VMWare Fusion.

To run Sysprep on the internal volume, see this article.

Migration with Winclone

Once the partition has been created in Disk Utility, quit out of Disk Utility. Verify that the newly created partition is visible as a mounted volume on the Mac desktop. Open Winclone and select Volume to Volume Cloning. Select the following options:

Select source volume as the internal Boot Camp partition.
Select the destination as the ExFAT volume you created on the external volume.
Click Clone.

If you get a error message about a block size mismatch, create a Winclone image and then restore the image to the external volume. See the articles below for creating and restoring a Winclone image:

Run Sysprep in a VM

If you did not run Sysprep prior to creating the image, you can run Sysprep in a Virtual Machine such as VMWare Fusion. See the article here.

Booting into Windows

Once the migration process is complete, restart while holding the Option key and the new external Boot Camp volume will be available for startup.

Tested Hardware

External booting was verified by the following process:

Windows 10 (1809 October Update) was installed via Boot Camp Assistant.
The Mac was booted into Windows 10, and Boot Camp drivers for that model were installed.
After the reboot required after Boot Camp drivers were installed, Sysprep was run and Windows shut down.
The Mac was booted into macOS and Winclone 7 installed and launched.
An ExFAT partition was created on the external drive (GUID partition table).
Boot Camp was migrated to the external partition using the Volume to Volume feature of Winclone 7. If a block size message was shown, a file-based image was created and the image was restored to the external partition.
Using Disk Utility, the Boot Camp partition was deleted from the internal drive.
The Mac was then booted to Windows on the external volume and verified to work.

Shortly, when the first Intel-based Macs reached in the market, Apple took the initiative to release a useful tool known as BootCamp Assistant. Using the help of BootCamp, Mac users now install and boot their native machine on Microsoft Windows along with the pre-existing OS installation. It minimizes the running of the different operating system simultaneously.
Backup BootCamp
For Backing up all the files and folders, one can easily use Time Machine features of Mac OS X. However, Time Machine can’t backup the BootCamp partition on the Apple hard drive. In such case, a 3rd party application comes handy which takes care of data backup on Windows partition.
Applications to Clone BootCamp
1) AOMEI Backupper

It is perfect for both new and advanced level users and provides a clean, user-friendly GUI. The primary backup option which this software provides is Disk Backup, Folder Backup and Partition Backup, System Backup.
Note: if you are looking for a fast and reliable data backup option on the fly, then AOMEI Backupper is the best solution for that.
2) Macrium Reflects Free Edition
After installation of this app, you will be presented with a registration form having a pop-up box that contains a serial key which is very specific to your system. After clicking on ‘OK’, an internet connection is required to provides necessary authorization of serial key before you can start using the program.
3) Drive Image XML
Though its GUI is not as interactive as its competitor, still, it is one of the powerful software for cloning Windows hard drive.
Image Creation
Here, you have two options for creating a data backup image: Drive to Drive as they call it or the standard backup that gives you the option to either use 'VolumeLocking' or the 'VolumeShadowService' since it is the system drive I'm backing up from within Windows.
So, the default selection Volume Locking is a bad idea in this case, as it does what it say's 'locksthevolume' aka drive.
Mac Based Software to Clone / Image BootCamp Partition
1) Stellar Drive Clone
It is a useful application for cloning the Mac based hard drive data including the BootCamp partition. Along with cloning from Mac internal hard drive, it provides certain other features:

Cloning a particular Mac volume
Cloning network drive
Cloning without resizing
Creating a disk image of Mac
Creating Bootable media for Mac OS X

2) Winclone
Winclone is an another great utility for Mac users for imaging the BootCamp partition. Winclone comes in 3 different version having different features in each version.