How to Replace Boot Camp Drive?

[XianPalin]

I plan on replacing my Boot Camp Drive (not partition, separate drive) in my Mac Pro (320GB with Vista 64, NTFS) with a 750 GB drive.

How do I do this? Do I put in the new drive and clone the Boot Camp partition using Disk Utility, and then take the 320gb out of it's slot and put in the 750gb, and Vista will boot fine? Is there anything special I need to do?

Or am I going to have to re-setup everything and reinstall windows?

[JNB]

AFAIK, you can't clone the NTFS partition with Apple Disk Utility. Make a clone using WinClone (http://twocanoes.com/winclone/) (free!); it's absolutely bulletproof. Install the new physical drive, create a BC partition, and restore the WinClone image onto the new partition.

[XianPalin]

It's not a partition, I have 2 physical drives. Drive 1 (500GB) has OSX/Leopard, Drive 2 (320GB) has Vista on it.

[BrownPlopz]

It will still work, don't worry.

[BrownPlopz]

You see, in the drop down menu, it's gonna list all of the volumes and drives you have, so your Boot Camp Drive will definately appear. Just select it from the dropdown, then click 'Image', and watch as it backs it up as a .winclone file. Then, put the new drive in, and open WinClone again, but click on the restore tab, and it's really straight forward from there.

[XianPalin]

Ah ok, I wish I could do it directly from drive to drive without having to create an entire image.. seems kind of silly if I can put both drives in the machine.

[JNB]

I'm aware you had different drives. Partition (or volume, if you prefer) refers to the logical space on a drive. For the purposes here, partition was more to the point, as that is what you're dealing with in Boot Camp, even if you use the entire 500GB space of a physical drive as a single partition.

Windows (NTFS in particular) is notoriously fussy about cloning. Ghost has been the standard tool used for years, but since being acquired by Norton, has become bloated and, well, crappy.

I use WinClone mainly because it's a Mac application, eliminating the need for a Windows boot disk or any other such nonsense. Well that, and it works perfectly. Did I mention it's free? ;)

[robains]

Unfortunately WinClone 2.2 didn't work for me with my Vista x64 drive. Generates an error soon after it tries to create the image. In fact, I'm having a heck of a time trying to find any software that can do a proper clone of a Vista x64 drive. I've tried a lot of freeware tools, but none of them seem to work with 64bit versions of Vista or Win7.

I'm looking into Casper 6.0 http://www.fssdev.com/products/casper/

The Casper 6.0 Value Pack with "Startup Disk" option. Apparently I'll need to boot to a Startup Disk first and then do cloning (OSX nor Vista x64 are loaded). Pricey at $70 -- I'll let you know if it works.

Rob