Alright I am about to pull my hair out - copying a windows partition to a new drive

[Ravich]

I have a HDD that is making bad noises, so I am going to replace it and send it in for a replacement (I already have the replacement: 2TB WD caviar black).

On this HDD, there are 2 partitions: one is my home drive for OSX, and the other is my windows partition with... well, windows. I have already successfully cloned the home drive partition.

The thing is that OSX cant format a partition NTFS, so I have tried twice now to use windows 7 to format the partition with no luck. I select the (correct) partition, and select to format it with NTFS which is my only option. It takes a good 30-40 minutes, and I dont understand why, but regardless, it finishes eventually. Then I restart my computer and boot into OSX.

I open disk utility and....

The partition shows up greyed out, labeled "disk0s3" which isnt what I named it, says it isnt mounted, and that the format is Mac OS extended (Journaled).


I dont care what method I use, I just want to transfer my windows partition from one HDD to the next. How?

 

[balamw]

Which Mac? Is this an iMac, Mac Pro?

Doesn't matter what you format it. You should be able to make a direct clone using a bitwise tool like dd.

EDIT: I'd try Clonezilla first, personally.

B

 

[Ravich]

carbon copy cloner didnt seem to be able to do it. I'll try clonezilla. This is a 2009 Mac Pro.

 

[alust2013]

There is also winclone, although it has been discontinued

 

[balamw]

carbon copy cloner didnt seem to be able to do it. I'll try clonezilla. This is a 2009 Mac Pro.

On the Mac Pro I would recommend having Windows on its own separate drive.

B

 

[Ravich]

On the Mac Pro I would recommend having Windows on its own separate drive.

B

I'll be able to do that when I get the replacement drive from whoever I bought it from, but can I ask why you say that?

 

[Ravich]

Okay, so I cant make heads or tails out of clonezilla. Will I be able to pull this off just by cloning the NTFS bootcamp partition to a Mac OSX journaled partition using carbon copy cloner?

I ask because it says this:

"(Destination drive name)" cannot support extended attributes larger than 4KB. Any extended attributes ("named streams") larger than 4KB that are associated with files and folders on "(Source drive name)" will not be preserved.



-.-

 

[dalstott]

Okay, so I cant make heads or tails out of clonezilla. Will I be able to pull this off just by cloning the NTFS bootcamp partition to a Mac OSX journaled partition using carbon copy cloner?
-.-

CCC is for Mac formats not NTFS.

Clones of Boot Camp NTFS partitions have been successful using 2 Windows applications namely Paragon Hard Disk ManagerTM 2011 Suite, and Casper 6.

Winclone seems to work on pre Lion Macs with XP and Vista but has been problematic with Win 7 and Lion.

CopyCatX is a Mac application that will clone the whole drive.

 

[Ravich]

Hmm, so I went ahead and tried it with CCC anyway, and as expected it wont boot from the partition. Is there anything I can do at this point?

 

[balamw]

Do you still have a bootable partition that you can work with?

B

 

[BarkingGhost]

Windows 7 has its own backup which will pretty much take a snapshot of the entire partition, create an image file, and demand you save it on an external hard drive (attached or networked). I did this for my wife's W7 computer (W7 Professional) as I didn't want to have to reinstall her apps in addition to W7 is something went wrong.

 

[dimme]

I was in a simular situation a few weeks back. I tried, clonezilla, true image windows backup, cleaninstall and then restore.
Finally I set up the new drive with bootcamp assistant, Bootes into Snow Leopard on a external drive ( I run Lion) made a backup with winclone and restored it to the new drive.
Works great