Winclone capabilities

[touchUpInside]

I've got an older Windows 7 computer that have several programs I use and have a concern that the mother board (or something) will fail someday.

I'm not sure how Winclone works.

With Winclone, can I clone the HDDs (one primary, one secondary) and run them on an iMac using Parallels ? And have most of it operate ? There are a whole variety of programs on the Win7 computer . . . Book Collector, MS-Office 2010, Notepad++, Maple 18, MATLAB, OrCAD, MicroC, Sony SoundForge, TI development software . . .

Currently, I use this computer via a remote desktop and am not sure what I'd do if it dies.

Suggestions welcome.


Thanks guys.

 

[z31fanatic]

I am afraid that it won't work.
I did an experiment a couple of days ago. I took out my Dell laptop's hard drive and put it in a USB 3.0 external enclosure and connected it to my mid 2014 MBP. The drive does show up as boot device but when I select it will not boot.

 

[touchUpInside]

ah . . . okay, I was hoping . . .

Thanks, for chiming in !

 

[snorkelman]

had to grab an image of one of the workshop machines (this was an ancient box no one had ever bothered to upgrade)

single drive and I was only interested in the main boot partition for use in a parallels vitual machine, so your mileage may vary

Easiest way I found was hooking up an external drive to the Windows machine then downloading and running Disk2VHD on that Windows machine to create a VHD image file of its windows partition.

Really simple bit of software to work with
1 chose the partition I wanted to image
2 chose VHD (not VHDX) as the image format
3 pointed it to where I wanted the VHD image file written
4 let it do its stuff

Then took the external drive over to the mac, dumped a copy of the VHD image (NEWVHD.VHD) onto desktop of the mac, then used parallels command line tools to convert the VHD image over to a parallels VM:

from a new terminal window type:

/Applications/Parallels\ Desktop.app/Contents/MacOS/prl_convert /Users/stevenc/Documents/NEWVHD.VHD --no-src-check --no-reconfig

replace the stevenc with whatever your user account name is and replace NEWVHD.VHD with whatever name you've given the VHD file you created (I'd stick to short file names without spaces one less thing to confuse it with)


fired up the new VM in parallels it did a bit of further reconfiguring and off we went

only hit 2 issues:

1st Windows authentication registration - on booting the VM up I got the you need to register windows now loop and it wouldn't take the original Dell machines OEM Windows product ID.

Found the solution to that was to just feed it any other legit Dell OEM product ID (anyone but the one the original machine was registered with) Quick scurry in the scrap pile found another old Dell XP box that had been running same version of Windows, typed its product ID in instead and all was well

2nd - the way parallels converts from VHD to a parallels disk theres no real option I can see to dynamically reclaim disc space

The original VHD Image was around 30GB deleting 10GB of old rubbish from the VM didnt give me option to recover any space in parallels so the 30GB image is still 30GB (even though its now only comprised of around 20GB of stuff)

In this particular case we weren't caring (and I didnt really look into the options to see if it was easy to resolve) but you may like to consider giving the source machine a good tidy up/shift uneccessary files over to another partition, before creating the VHD to avoid a bloated

Other than that it works really well - some of the apps on that particular machine use ancient hardware dongles (why we were stuck going down this route in first place) and even those were recognized and happy to play ball when we plugged them in to the mac