Cloning Windows 7 Boot Camp Drive

Question

Level 1

4 points

Cloning Windows 7 Boot Camp Drive

First of all, I've read tons of threads and there is so much information that none of them have helped me directly, so I'm going to try and be specific and ask what I need help with.

I've cloned my Mac OS X drive before when upgrading hard drives, I used CCC and it was easy peasy. Copy data from A to B, remove A, start up B, DONE.

Trying to clone my boot camp drive has been a nightmare and none of it is making sense. I used Norton GHOST to clone my hard drive, I read that you can use that to do clones. So I did that, rebooted and help option to boot from my new drive. Windows 7 says it was not a legit copy. So I did some more reading, and people said it was because the registry is seeing the new drive as F and not C so the registry needed to be changed. I tried to access the registry via task manager (Since when in that mode it doesn't let you do anything) but it didn't exist. So THEN I tried using Paragon Repair Kit Express to try and use it's Boot Loader feature to change the drive letter. It was unavailable and wouldn't let me do it!

So then I tried using EASEUS instead to clone my drive. Went fine. Except now when I hold option to reboot, it is not available to choose even though when I start windows, I see it as drive F:.

I literally just installed Windows 7 and it was a pain in the ***, and cloning has become just as much of a pain in the ***.

I would love your help but I am not looking for "Just do a clean install," That's the obvious option but cloning should not be this difficult either. Is there something I'm doing wrong? Something I can do to just make this drive bootable? (The partition is there, the data is there, it's just not shown as bootable). Is there a tool I don't know of that can make an easy clone of a bootcamp drive and make it bootable? I heard of Winclone but it is not W7 compatible and has been discontinued, sorry but I don't trust that.

Any help would be appreciated, thanks so much!

Mac Pro, Mac OS X (10.6.4)

Posted on Mar 1, 2011 6:45 PM

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Answer 1

The hatter

Level 9

60,990 points

Mar 2, 2011 4:02 AM in response to C.Bledsoejr

I have used Paragon's Hard Drive Manager 2011 Suite.
The company has products that support Boot Camp.

People have once or twice used both CopyCatX and Casper 6.

All of the above are in the $50.

I would ask on Norton Community about Norton Ghost if it works now. I got banned from there!! 🙂

And, I am on a Mac Pro, too. So I can attest it working, and as easy as pie, or as easy as SuperDuper if it is on a dedicated drive. Haven't got a mixed OS X plus Windows on one drive (not a good idea to me). I did it with two internal drives and then pulled old and moved Windows drive to drive bay.

OPTION will not work.

Oh, and before you use Paragon "Clone OS to SSD" (works for all drives) - DELETE partitions so it won't have to run on restart (You'll understand if you do try it, and they have 30 day demo).

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Answer 2

Mar 2, 2011 8:15 AM in response to C.Bledsoejr

I work mainly on a 3.5 year old MacBook Pro. I have used Clonezilla to clone my internal drive that has my OS-X and my Boot Camp (Windows 7) onto an external drive. After the clone, I have swapped out the external drive (clone) with the internal drive (original) and everything booted just fine. I did not run my cloned Windows drive for very long so I don't know if it would force a re-activation or not, but that happens fairly often for me when I have to make changes in the virtualized environment, and it activates online with no problems.

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Answer 3

C.Bledsoejr Author

Level 1

4 points

Mar 2, 2011 7:04 PM in response to GeekBoy.from.Illinois

That's the second time I heard Clonezilla. I tried it today and it worked, I didn't have to do any sort of weird reactivation or reassigning the disk. I took out my old failing drive right afterwards before rebooting and it started up okay. Clonezilla isn't the prettiest, but burning the .iso wasn't so bad. Thanks for that recommendation! I can't believe it took me 5 times and 2 days before I was able to create a successful clone.

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Answer 4

Scott216

Level 1

5 points

Mar 19, 2011 7:02 AM in response to GeekBoy.from.Illinois

I just got a new Macbook Pro with SSD drive. I tried running clonezilla 1.2.4-28-686 and Clonezilla filed to boot - it gave me a bunch of errors. I've used Clonezilla many times on my windows computers, but this is my first shot with a MAC. What version of clonezilla did you use?

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Answer 5

Mar 19, 2011 7:41 AM in response to Scott216

I'm either using the 20101219-Maveric release, or Live 1.2.6-40 release. I think I have the 32 bit disc for backward compatibility with some of my older machines at home.

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Answer 6

Scott216

Level 1

5 points

Mar 20, 2011 8:25 AM in response to GeekBoy.from.Illinois

I tried clonezilla 1.2.6-59-amd64 and this version seemed to run okay, but it didn't successfully clone my SSD drive. When it was done I noticed the file size of the target files totaled only 14MB. I didn't see any errors from clonezilla. I even tried it a 2nd time, but I had the same result.

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Answer 7

Mar 22, 2011 8:12 PM in response to Scott216

Perhaps it is a 32 bit/64 bit issue. I don't know. I don't happen to have an SSD drive to test with, but I can verify that with my spinning disk, the clone worked perfectly.

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Answer 8

Apr 6, 2011 8:37 PM in response to C.Bledsoejr

Hey I know you stated that you solved your problem using clonezilla, but I just wanted to say that if your Windows 7 install was from an OEM version of Windows then things can get a bit messy. Just putting that out there for ya.

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Answer 9

Scott216

Level 1

5 points

Apr 9, 2011 2:51 PM in response to chris.jones1

What do you mean things can get messy if you have Windows 7 OEM? Would this cause problems with clonezilla?

BTW, I still haven't been able to get clonezilla to work on my new Macbook pro (with SSD drive) - that's just with a straight OSX install, no bootcamp. But I do plan on doing bootcamp with Windows 7.

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Answer 10

The hatter

Level 9

60,990 points

Apr 9, 2011 4:29 PM in response to Scott216

System Builder is fine. What most people mean is not to use a DELL specific build.

I use System Builder mostly, rather than spring for full retail.

Either be specific and clear or someone is putting FUD out there.

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Answer 11

Apr 9, 2011 4:53 PM in response to The hatter

The hatter wrote:
Either be specific and clear or someone is putting FUD out there.

Are you directing this statement at anyone particular, or are you just putting the FUD in FUD?

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Answer 12

Apr 21, 2011 7:39 PM in response to C.Bledsoejr

I'm having problems.

I upgraded my internal drive. I cloned the OSX partition, and then swapped out the old drive into an external enclosure. So now I have a Bootcamp volume with W7 on it in an external enclosure and I want to clone that to a partition I created with Bootcamp Assistant on my internal drive.

First, CopyCatX isn't performing as I expected. When I try to clone it doesn't give me any option of cloning the external Bootcamp volume. It just doesn't show. Neither can I make a backup of it.

Second, Paragon Partition Manager Pro is useless to me because I don't have a Windows environment to boot into

Third, Clonezilla is seriously too technical for me.

Is there nothing, or no system, for simply copying the entirety of an externally stored Bootcamp volume onto an internal partition under OSX?

Thanks for any guidance

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Answer 13

The hatter

Level 9

60,990 points

Apr 21, 2011 8:02 PM in response to immanence

My fud was directed to the post above (Scott) for his OEM comment.

Try putting the drive back so you can boot Windows, and I never used or recommend Paragon Partition Mgr but Hard Drive Manager Suite 2011 which I use almost on a daily basis on 4 systems to do one step clone of Windows to another full hard drive.

Never heard anyone say "too technical" maybe just the first go-round which is also a trial run and learning experience, on anything new.

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Answer 14

ds store

Level 7

30,715 points

Apr 22, 2011 7:15 PM in response to Scott216

To clone a OS X partition/drive formatted HFS+ you need Carbon Copy Cloner as it will "bless" the new drive/partition (and other things) so it's bootable. It has been my experience that one shouldn't use this method to clone a different Mac to another. Or a older to a newer machine. Rather only the same spec Mac.

To clone a Windows partition/drive formatted FAT, exFAT, NTSF you should use Clonezilla

What I see is Microsoft is not wanting utilites like to Norton Ghost to do their magic anymore, they want one OS copy on one hard drive and if you need to make a backup, it's a Image file with a bootable disk instead of a clone. Vista Pro and above (I think) and for sure Windows 7 provides a system restore disk and images of your boot drive to recover from.

I think Microsoft is taking multiple things into the copy protection scheme for Windows, the hard drive id, the IP address, the computer id, MAC address and so forth. Go messing around too much and it just causes issues.

For instance I reinstalled Vista fresh on my new 17" Quad, but have it installed on older 15" I plan to delete it. Vista was gving me all sorts of headaches, wouldn't install updates and just a general slowdown. Then poof a few days later it was fine as rain. Everything updated no problem.

Clonezilla likely has some Linux magic in there someplace, not like Microsoft can do anything about it.

Likely Clonezilla doesn't have the OS X blessing and other tricks to make cloning possible as they are Linux users, so commodity PC hardware is more to their tastes, no OS X boxen. So they are going simply by a HFS+ clone, not the added OS X magic that Carbon Copy Cloner employs.

User uploaded file

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Answer 15

The hatter

Level 9

60,990 points

Apr 23, 2011 4:16 AM in response to ds store

Ah, I guess you haven't used Paragon clone tool.

Yes, Windows 7 SP1 may be more sensitive but people clone Windows all the time.

I Use and recommend Paragon Hard Drive Suite 2011 because it works great on Mac Pro doing Windows to clone to/from SSD or any other drive. They have separate programs for Boot Camp too.

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