SSD options for mid-2011 iMac

Thanks for the tips everyone. I just installed one of the OWC kits with my son (budding 12 year old computer guru). First I cloned the HDD onto the SSD with a USB-SATA adapter cable, by using Macrium Reflect's cloning tool where you create a bootable USB flash drive, then boot into that and clone the drives. Seemed to work great.

I had Bootcamp set up on the HDD and now somehow I can't boot into Windows (get a blue screen saying I need to recover). It will boot into Mac just fine.

Is there a trick to restoring my bootcamp? The partition is on the disk, I just can't seem to boot into it. I have Winclone installed on the Mac, and a recent backup, but if I try to restore the winclone image it can't find the bootcamp partition to restore it to. If I look at the disk in disk utilities, it doesn't show the bootcamp partition.

Hmmm...I know it's there, I saw it after I cloned the disk. But Mac can't seem to see it.

Any solutions? Thanks.

Strange--you'd think when the HDD was cloned it would simply make an exact copy, sector by sector, onto the SSD, and the result would be identical. I guess it "ain't that simple."

There's no way I'm opening up that iMac again...I'm perfectly comfortable diving into any windows desktop but dealing with those cables (especially the ribbon one) was a nightmare. I'm afraid I'll mess it up (as it was I had to reopen everything once to reseat that ribbon cable).

I have the original HDD, I'll try cloning the Bootcamp partition from MacOS. I'll check out the Winclone site and see if they have a good step-by-step for this.

Thanks, I'll report back with results.

When I plug the original HDD into one of the iMac's USB ports with the SATA-USB adapter, it doesn't show up as one of the startup options (just MacOS, Windows, and Recovery are available). If I boot into Mac, it shows up in Finder as "Remote Disc" with no contents and no info.

I used that adapter to plug the SSD into this machine and it worked fine. The HDD was working normally when I uninstalled it.

What might be the problem here?

Any way to boot into a flash drive of some kind and repair the bootcamp partition?

Got it...I ordered an external enclosure for the drive.

So once I boot into Mac with the old HDD, I can use Disk Utility to manage the SDD? Maybe I can just use Winclone to "restore to volume" on the SDD. Hope it's that easy. I'm referencing this: https://support.twocanoes.com/hc/en-us/articles/201170769-Move-Boot-Camp-to-a-replacement-drive.

Will report with results. Should have the enclosure in a couple of days.

Is there a trick to getting the Mac to boot into the external HDD? I've got it all set up in an enclosure, and when I start up the computer and hold down the Option key I see the drive, but when I select it and continue it boots into the internal SSD anyway.

What am I missing?

Turns out it kept booting to the internal SSD even when I chose the external HDD because they had identical identifiers. I downloaded a utility that changed the identifier on the HDD, and now I'm booted into that. I used disk utility to reformat the internal SSD, which is has a GUID partition map and is 1 single Mac OS Extended (Journaled) partition.

Now, according to Winclone, I should get Mac OS migrated over to the SSD first, make sure that's working right, then restore the bootcamp partition. But they don't really give any details on how to do that.

What's the best way to go about moving Mac OS over from the HDD to the SSD?

I'm thinking maybe I want to boot into recovery and then restore the HDD from the SSD? Or is there a better way?

Thanks.

Well, made progress but another stumbling block has come up. I've got OSX running on the SSD, I've got an empty Bootcamp partition all ready to go on the SSD, and I've got the original HDD mounted via USB. But Winclone keeps failing to clone or image the HDD Bootcamp volume.

After reviewing the log, I found this:

2019-03-23 14:57:04.582935-0400  localhost com.twocanoes.WincloneHelper[829]: [c[ERROR] Failed to open NTFS file "/Users/Bennet/AppData/Local/Microsoft/Windows/UPPS/UPPS.bin": No such file or directory
 ++++
2019-03-23 14:57:04.815554-0400  localhost com.twocanoes.WincloneHelper[829]: [com.twocanoes.winclone:WincloneHelper] +++++ ERROR: Exiting with error code 46:
       NTFS-3G encountered an error (check errno).
 ++++
2019-03-23 14:57:05.146072-0400  localhost Winclone[753]: [com.twocanoes.winclone:Application] Helper tool error: There was an error while file imaging. Please check the volume and try again. Status:46

Do I have some bad sectors or something on the HDD? How do I check/repair? "First Aid" in Disk Utility is grayed out...

Alternative approaches to try here?

I ended up restoring from a Winclone image I created when I first installed Windows 10 back in 2015. That worked fine...although something about the update process seems odd. I ran Windows update repeatedly until it said everything was up to date, but when I installed an Adobe app it said the current version of the app was not compatible with my version of Windows, and did I want to upgrade Windows first.

I'll try checking the health of that original HDD, was thinking of using it for backups but not if it's going bad. Will be 8 years old this year.

This SSD migration process was a lot more time and trouble than I expected. I still don't understand why you can't simply clone the drive and do the swap, which was my original plan, but I guess Bootcamp really complicates things.

Thanks for all the help. I definitely learned more about MacOS and disk utility (I spend 90% of my time on Windows, but it's good to know MacOS).