Essential Bootcamp App - Winclone

Yesterday, I found a great (free) app for those needing to clone their bootcamp partition. Maybe you have heard of it, but it was new to me - winclone.

I needed to switch the Hard Drive in one of my machines, and didn't want to have to do a new install of everything. Time Machines does great for OSX. But bootcamp is more complicated. That is where winclone comes in. It makes a complete image of your bootcamp partition, and then restores to a new machine. Very simple.

I highly recommend it. And also, if you use it and it works well for you, remember to support the developer.

 

Just a side note, winclone doesnt support fat32 partitions. So you'll have to change the partition to ntfs using a commandline, kinda a hitch but not really.

Also I've been wanting to swap out my hdd for a while now, but was never sure how I would restore the bootcamp partition. I know I would have used winclone, but what process did you follow? Time machine, then bootcamp assistant, then restore the windows partition from the winclone copy? Did the bootcamp partition change in size at all?

 

The first thing I did on the old HD was to use winclone to shrink the bootcamp partition. That way, you can restore to any size bootcamp partition without issue.

So, after that. I made a winclone image, and put it on an external drive (I just used my bootcamp backup drive). Then TimeMachine restore onto the new drive, bootcamp assistant, and restore image with winclone. It was very easy, and actually pretty quick.

 

Ah ok, thats pretty much the process i though that i'd have to do, so its good to know that itll work out in the future when i get a bigger hdd. thanks again

 

THANKS for this.. you saved me haha

 

Just curious on if WinClone allows me to copy the boot camp partition, change the partition size using the boot camp assistant, then recopy vista onto the new partition... if so, that would be awesome.

 

if you plan on shrinking it, you have to go into the menu and run the shrink command first.

If you plan on increasing the size of the bootcamp partition, just image, and restore, no other steps necessary

 

^^^ What he said.

 

i saw on their website that they now support fat32 partitions, i have a fat32 xp partition that i would like to increase in size and change to ntfs, can do this without reinstalling everything?

 

Well, id guess you could convert the partition to ntfs in windows with a commandline. Then backup using winclone, delete the bootcamp partition, resize hfs partition, run bootcamp assist with new size, then restore from the winclone image.

Something along those lines.

Can you resize without reinstalling? I think you might be able to do it technically with termainl commands and so forth, but i havnt looked into it in a long time. Can you convert to ntfs? Yes, you can do that without reinstalling.