When restoring with Winclone, do I need to create a Boot Camp partition first?

I've always just made a new partition with Disc Utility. Winclone will reformat it to NTFS and restore the image.

Correct. You can only restore a Winclone image to a partition the same size or bigger.

Thread revival. I allowed the Applestore to replace my hard drive before I checked to see exactly how large my bootcamp partition was. I have a general notion. If I try to restore a winclone image, to a Windows partition that is too small, will Winclone immediately tell me it failed or give some other info to tell me the partition needs to be larger? I assume looking at a Winclone image will not say how big a partition it represents. I'm running Mavericks.
Thanks!

Update: Duh... the image tells me how big it is. I know how big the partition is.

But... I've got several Winclone images. One will restore, the other produces a message that says "The Image You Are Trying to Restore does not have the Correct info". I made both of these image in the same way. Does anyone know what produces this message? Thanks!

I just bought and used WinClone and had several issues with it. I bought it to help ease from a new iMac to a new rMBP (14 day trade in). It was not as seamless as I was hoping, caused me more work then necessary.

But, after multiple Google searches I found the answers I needed on the WinClone site, just not easy to find.

If your WinClone image is bigger then your partition, it will not work.
The instructions I found had me making new disk images and shrinking the WinClone files. Multiple steps that ended up not working.

In the end I just re-installed everything as I had done when the unit was new, and wished I had saved my money on the WinClone package.

porthole2 said:

In the end I just re-installed everything as I had done when the unit was new, and wished I had saved my money on the WinClone package.

Click to expand...

I own WinClone and love it. It's saved me on many occasions and I really love the increased speed and multi-core CPU support of the latest version. I've never had any problems with it and recommend it highly.

I read your post and I'm still not sure what you did or where it went wrong for you but I want to amend the advice given by someone above 2 years ago. If you're using a Fusion Drive, and in particular the 3TB model, you will want to create the BootCamp partition with the BootCamp Assistant and not Disk Utility to avoid any issues. In general, it is just a better practice to use BootCamp Assistant period.

I do not know what i did wrong if anything.
What I do know is that - I made the clone, traded in my iMac for a rMBP and attempted to reinstall the clone.

I went from an iMac with the 3TB drive and a 500GB partition for Windows so I needed to down size the rMBP partition. That was a 1TB SSD which now has a Windows 200GB partition.

I did all the very many multi steps involved to resize the clone, several times. But in the end it just wasn't doing what I needed and I ended just using Bootcamp assist and started over.

The real downside is that I now have an issue with my Windows activation.
I had to call in to Microsoft to get Win 7 activated under Bootcamp (new hardware). I then reinstalled Parallels using Win 7 from the bootcamp partition and I now have a new "needs activation" issue for the VM copy.

Although, my 2010 version of Office activated under both boot options with no issues.