Restoring Mac-BootCamp-Windows-partition image to Windows machine

Question

I'm running Windows XP SP3 on my Mac using Boot Camp.

Objective:
I'd like to move this partition to a Windows machine.

This is what I tried:
1. Create image using Winclone
2. Restore drive to disk partition on Windows machine using Paragon
3. Reboot from new partition

Results:
It attempts to boot in XP (Windows flag and progress bar load screen) but then gives me the old BSOD. Safe mode just hangs while loading.

(I then uninstalled KB977165 on a hunch, but that did nothing to help the issue.)

Any ideas, advice, etc would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Windows is kinda picky about switching core hardware components. Sometimes changing a few things just requires you to re-activate windows. Sometimes it won't even boot. I expect this is a driver issue when it can't boot.

In any case... I've been able to fix it by doing a windows repair from the installation cd. Its a bit confusing to get to the repair option. When you boot the CD... it'll ask you first if you'd like to install windows or repair a current installation. If you choose to repair a current installation, it'll just drop you into the command line with access to your hard drive. You have to choose to install windows. Then at the screen where you can select the partition you want to install windows to... it'll show your current windows installation and offer a repair option. This is the repair option you'll want to use.

Doing this kind of windows repair replaces a lot of core windows components. You might have to re-install a bunch of windows updates. You'll have to re-enter your license key. Some programs might not work anymore.

Answer 2

This post may not be relevant for those primarily working in a Mac environment for which Windows requires only an occasional visit; but for those, such as myself, who only bought a MacPro for hardware and almost exclusively use Windows, a "primitive" backup and bare metal restore utility such as Winclone doesn't measure up.

Within the Windows environment, there is one "enterprise" level utility that meets all the need of those using multiple operating systems, including virtual machines, and that utility is called ShadowProtect, produced by StorageCraft (http://www.storagecraft.com)--I don't have any connection to this company, by the way, I just researched like crazy to find a backup utility for my Bootcamp machine.

While rather expensive (~$100/yr), this utility is the best Windows backup program I have seen--Microsoft Gold & integrated with VM ware.

Since I couldn't find anything on the internet laying out the details of doing a bare metal restore with ShadowProtect in the Bootcamp environment, I thought it would be useful to document how to accomplish such a restore.

1) Within Windows do a backup using ShadowProtect to create an image file. 2) When the time comes to do a "bare metal restore", from within OS-X use bootcamp assistant to format for windows and exit; reboot from the ShadowProtect W7 boot disk. 3) Use Windows disk manager to reformat the windows partition--not the drive--into NTFS, and set the partition active. This destroys the empty FAT32 shell created by OS-X and leaves a partition map and MBR that can be used by Windows. I guess this is the reason it's so hard to repartition a Bootcamp disk, since the partition map has to be understood both by OS-X and by Windows. 4) Now use ShadowProtect to restore the system drive image using the default parameters which don't touch the MBR, hidden tracks or disk signatures unless you have special requirements--in which case you should research these on the StorageCraft site. ShadowProtect will precisely reproduce the Bootcamp drive, but with the partition boot information tailored to your new OS by Windows. When I did a conversion from my system disk on a hard drive to one on an SSD, it took about 15 minutes to create the backup image on another drive and less than 10 minutes to load it on the SSD. I then rebooted to an unchanged W7 running at incredible speeds on the SSD.