External disk partitioning for Windows and OS X backup

Thanks for replying.

The macmini (internal) disk is the same size as the external disk I want to use for a full disk backup, 500GB.

This is the layout of the internal disk as seen from Windows 8.1:

D: is Yosemite

E: is Mountain Lion

C: is Windows 8.1 (Bootcamp)

This is the result of a repaired Bootcamp partition using a Hybrid MBR. I merged the OS X Yosemite partition with its recovery partition, the OS X Lion with its recovery partition, and fixed the Bootcamp MBR so now they are all bootable. As a result, as you can see, there are about 128MB of unallocated (buffer zones?) on the disk.

I'd like to clone this 500GB disk in such a way that I can use the back up in each OS. I don't use Time Machine because it makes the backups unerasable (readonly).

I guess my question is which would be the best way to format the external drive or which program to use to clone it, because it has more types of file systems on it, and I'm not sure if a Windows program will take care of things on the OS X side and viceversa.

Which one of them will take care of the partitioning part? So, if I use CCC this will probably clone Yosemite and Lion, but if I boot in Windows to clone the Bootcamp partition, will Winclone be able to create an extra partition for the Windows backup?

Not sure how the partitioning part will be managed by separate programs.

Thanks for the reply.

Thanks, I'll try that.

What you guys think about Clonezilla? It supports a huge range of filesystems and OSs based on different architectures (x86, x86-64).

Well, sorry, but I'm not going to buy Winclone just for this.

What I did until now is:

I erased the external drive and created one HFS+ partition on it, using Disk Utility, to prepare it for OS X backup (it was previously formatted as NTFS, so I couldn't write to it from OS X)

I cloned the Yosemite volume using CCC. But I noticed CCC does not have any direct tools to partition drives. So, I went back to Disk Utility and manually created one partition which is the same size as the Bootcamp internal volume on the macmini (~150GB) and split the Yosemite (external) volume into two partitions, which I resized, so that they match the internal disk partitions sizes.

Then I used CCC to clone the Lion partition to the external partition with the same size.

Now I had a remaining HFS+ partition on the external drive which was empty. I rebooted in Windows and used the Disk Management tool to delete the HFS+ volume. Then I created a buffer area on the disk with unallocated raw 128MB disk space between the last OS X partition (Mt Lion) and the next partition I was going to create. I created a simple NTFS volume which I want to use as a back up partition for the Bootcamp/Windows internal drive partition.

So now the picture is like this:

My question is which free software can I use to backup the Windows partition in such a way that it will be bootable and recognised by the EFI provided by Apple on the macmini. Will CCC work for this or not? Is there any Windows program that can also copy the MBR from the macmini so that the Windows clone on the external disk will be bootable?

I know that there is an issue with making external Windows partitions bootable, this is apparently not supported on Windows (but as far as I've heard, it's possible).

An update to this issue, in case anyone finds this information useful:

So, first I cloned the OS X partitions from the internal macmini disk to an external disk, and they were both bootable. Then I went back to Windows and formatted the remaining space on the external disk as NTFS (it had roughly the same size as the internal disk Bootcamp partition).

Then I cloned the Windows/Bootcamp partition from Windows 8.1 using a disk cloning utility. Now, the Windows partition on the external disk is bootable, but the OS X partitions have become invisible as bootable options. I can see them in Disk Utility as greyed out partitions, but they're not mounted anymore.

So, much to my surprise it is possible to clone a Windows partition on an external disk and be able to boot Windows on an external disk. I can see this in OS X as "Windows clone" and it's reported as bootable in Startup Disk. In fact, both the internal disk Bootcamp partition and the external disk Windows clone are visible as bootable options in the Startup Disk tab (in System Preferences). But, when I restart and hold Alt to see the boot menu, the Windows clone doesn't appear. So, it can only be booted from OS X (and possibly from Windows too).

Not sure why the macmini bootloader does not see this external bootable Windows partition if OS X can see it.

I suppose when the Windows disk cloning utility copied the Bootcamp partition it also marked the external disk as MBR type. So, now, when the external disk is read, the macmini bootloader no longer identifies any GPT type of partition on the disk.

The good news is, it's possible to make a Windows clone on an external disk which is also bootable and fully functional.

gpt show: /dev/disk1: mediasize=500107862016; sectorsize=512; blocks=976773168

gpt show: /dev/disk1: PMBR at sector 0

gpt show: /dev/disk1: Pri GPT at sector 1

gpt show: /dev/disk1: Sec GPT at sector 976773167

start size index contents

0 1 PMBR

1 1 Pri GPT header

2 32 Pri GPT table

34 6

40 409600 1 GPT part - C12A7328-F81F-11D2-BA4B-00A0C93EC93B

409640 598076104 2 GPT part - EBD0A0A2-B9E5-4433-87C0-68B6B72699C7

598485744 262144

598747888 82031248 3 GPT part - EBD0A0A2-B9E5-4433-87C0-68B6B72699C7

680779136 640

680779776 262144 4 GPT part - 48465300-0000-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC

681041920 292968448 5 GPT part - EBD0A0A2-B9E5-4433-87C0-68B6B72699C7

974010368 2762767

976773135 32 Sec GPT table

976773167 1 Sec GPT header

Disk: /dev/disk1 geometry: 60801/255/63 [976773168 sectors]

Signature: 0xAA55

Starting Ending

#: id cyl hd sec - cyl hd sec [ start - size]

------------------------------------------------------------------------

1: EE 1023 254 63 - 1023 254 63 [ 1 - 976773167] <Unknown ID>

2: 00 0 0 0 - 0 0 0 [ 0 - 0] unused

3: 00 0 0 0 - 0 0 0 [ 0 - 0] unused

4: 00 0 0 0 - 0 0 0 [ 0 - 0] unused

In Windows, disk1s2 (the Yosemite clone) and disk1s3 (the Mt Lion clone) partitions are seen by diskmgmt as having an HFS file system. Also, another thing to note is that all OS X partitions (internal and external) are seen as free space in Windows, even though explorer shows all their files.

OS X shows the same partitions from the external disk as having an MS-DOS (FAT) file system.

So Windows sees partitions created by OS X as HFS and can open/mount them and OS X sees the same partitions as MS-DOS (but can't open or mount them)...