I never had the need to clone a Boot Camp partition — until yesterday (when I did a hard drive replacement and clone). There were several suggestions for cloning the Boot Camp partition around the interwebs, talking about complicated (well, time consuming) techniques using XP programs, re-creating disk images via boot camp, and re-installing XP and manually dragging/dropping files back. Uhg!
Twocanoes decided to make this super simple, offering a terrific free (donationware) application called Winclone. Very minimal interface with just one purpose, cloning Boot Camp; both NTFS and FAT partitions.
There are two views: Image and Restore.
Image is the view where you select the Boot Camp partition on your local computer and convert it into a Winclone image file. I saved it to the new drive which was connected to the computer via USB enclosure.
Restore is the view where you select the image you just created and restore it to your new Boot Camp partition. I just selected the image, selected the new Boot Camp partition (connected via USB), and clicked the restore button.
Then just replace your hard drive and you’re ready to go! Thanks Winclone!!
