Resolved Cloning Win 10 from HDD to SSD /cMP

[crjackson2134]

I have macOS installed on an Apple SSD stick in a PCIe slot for my boot drive & Win 10 on a very old/slow 250 GB HDD.

I want to clone the HDD to My 500 GB Samsung 840 Pro SSD that’s installed on a Solo X2 PCIe Card.

Will this work for booting my Win 10 boot camp install, and what cloning software can do this while resizing partitions?

UPDATE:

After becoming a little more alert (meds wearing off), I saw a similar thread and it seems WinClone is my answer for cloning.

I still don’t know if it will be bootable from a Solo X2 PCIe adapter card. Anyone have that answer?

 

[chscag]

As you found out, WinClone will work to clone from one drive to another. However, I don't know if the clone will be bootable. Moving the Windows boot sector from one drive to another usually does not work. Much easier to do with macOS. Let us know.

 

[crjackson2134]

As you found out, WinClone will work to clone from one drive to another. However, I don't know if the clone will be bootable. Moving the Windows boot sector from one drive to another usually does not work. Much easier to do with macOS. Let us know.

Thanks, others have reported that the clone will be bootable out of the gate. My only question now is, will it boot from my PCIe Adapter (Solo X2).

I’m thinking Win will see this as an external drive and fail to boot.

I haven’t used Win in many years, so I just want to know what I’m in for.

 

[hfg]

Boot your currently running Windows installation WITH the Solo X2 card installed in a slot so that your Windows will load the drivers for the card. Then you should be able to boot that image from the card without further problems.

 

[crjackson2134]

Boot your currently running Windows installation WITH the Solo X2 card installed in a slot so that your Windows will load the drivers for the card. Then you should be able to boot that image from the card without further problems.

Thanks, it is already installed when booting both Windows and macOS. Just want to repurpose the drive by cloning Win 10. So it sounds like a simple clone and go will work then.

Thanks so much.

 

[shafez]

Paragon Hard Disk Manager 16 is very good.

 

[crjackson2134]

So far I'm not getting the hang of WinClone. I got the pro version today, and I thought I'd have an option to migrate the BOOTCAMP drive over to my SSD. I can't find an option for anything like that.

Do I need to format the SSD first to NTFS or FAT32 or something? What am I doing wrong here? I thought the whole point was so that I clone from drive A to drive B. I wonder if I should have went with Acronis TrueImage to get this done.

So I'm making an image file and I guess I'll restore it (if possible to the SSD).

 

[crjackson2134]

Okay, so something strange is going on.

The clone wouldn’t boot at first. It just froze the computer when selected as a boot option. Then I switched back to the Win HDD and it booted. I shut it down, and restarted without selecting a boot drive, and it booted the Win SSD successfully. I was elated.

So I went to boot into macOS to delete the Win HDD partition and it had disappeared.

I can’t find it using the Apple DU even when selecting to view all connected drives.

I booted the Win SSD and it doesn’t show up there either. I wanted to repurpose the drive, but it’s just gone. Could I have somehow caused a drive failure? I doubt it, but I’m clueless at the moment. It’s not seen by either OS.

Anyone have a clue as to what’s going on?

UPDATE:

I removed the drive & placed it in a USB dock for testing. The motor spins normally, but the drive isn’t recognized by either OS or their respective disk utilities.

So it seems that in a strange twist of fate, the stress of intensive disk reading required to image the drive must have killed it. Seems like I moved the install to SSD just in the nick of time.

 

[hfg]

I just use the standard version of Winclone here. Although I think the newer versions might be able to do disk-to-disk cloning, I have always simply created a Winclone image file of my Windows installation existing on a drive (and stored that file on a OS X drive), then use Disk Utility to format the destination drive (SSD) as FAT, then use Winclone to copy the image file to the new drive and size it to maximum size. It will be NTFS when it is done.

I have always had to remove the old Windows drive before booting the new copy, or I would often find myself back in the original installation after booting the new copy. This may be a disk booting priority issue.

I then use Winclone to keep an up-to-date copy of the Windows installation after updates or usage changes so that I can easily restore it if something should go wrong.

Good luck ....

 

[crjackson2134]

I just use the standard version of Winclone here. Although I think the newer versions might be able to do disk-to-disk cloning, I have always simply created a Winclone image file of my Windows installation existing on a drive (and stored that file on a OS X drive), then use Disk Utility to format the destination drive (SSD) as FAT, then use Winclone to copy the image file to the new drive and size it to maximum size. It will be NTFS when it is done.

I have always had to remove the old Windows drive before booting the new copy, or I would often find myself back in the original installation after booting the new copy. This may be a disk booting priority issue.

Good luck ....

This is the same thing I did except I didn’t remove the original drive. I wanted to use it as a storage drive for the WinClone image.

I’m pretty sure the drive is dead at this point. I’m going to boot a live Linux cd tomorrow and see if I can access the drive with Linux utilities. If not... it gets a .40cal slug(s) through it for fun before tossing.

 

[hfg]

You don't have to physically remove the old Windows drive ... just reformat it to remove the Windows boot. You will want to format it for OS X if you are going to store Winclone images on it ... and that should show you if the drive is useable or not. Otherwise .... good hunting!

 

[crjackson2134]

You don't have to physically remove the old Windows drive ... just reformat it to remove the Windows boot. You will want to format it for OS X if you are going to store Winclone images on it ... and that should show you if the drive is useable or not. Otherwise .... good hunting!

That was exactly my intention but alas, the drive can’t be reformatted. No drive utility can even see the device so as to delete the partition or reformat.

 

[hfg]

We have similar Mac Pro configurations. Mine is a 5.1 12-core 3.33GHz GTX 980 ti (flashed MVC) and boots OS X from a 1TB Apple SSD stick on PCIe card. I have a Velocity DUO X2 with a 500B SSD for Windows10 and a 960GB SSD for scratch. It has been working great for quite some time.

I see that I did have a SOLO X2 card at one time (and SOLO X1 card), but I don't recall if there was a problem booting from it, or if I just updated to the DUO for the dual drive capability. I seem to recall that one of the Velocity cards did require a firmware update for some reason.

Do I read correctly that you do have things working correctly now, other than having possibly killed the old Windows HDD? If so .... that's great!

 

[crjackson2134]

Do I read correctly that you do have things working correctly now, other than having possibly killed the old Windows HDD? If so .... that's great!

Yeah, it’s working fine aside from the old drive failing. To be honest, the drive is exactly 18 years old this month, so it was time. I’ll know for sure after testing with some Linux tools and Spinwrite.

UPDATE:

Just an FYI... Today I tested the failed drive on Linux Ubuntu. The drive controller can be see but it reports no media connected. So I'm guessing a controller chip burned out or some such. I had no luck with SpinRite 6 because it couldn't see my Mac Keyboard. I would have had to pull out one of my older systems to try SpinRite and this little drive wasn't worth it. On a side note, I have a matching 18 year old DeskStar that I installed and it's working fine. The drives were used as RAID0 storage back in 19-throw-it-away. The second drive hasn't seen nearly as much spin time, so maybe I'll get a few months out of it.