Clone Mac Disk Drives including Boot Camp Partition

You might be on the edge of losing all essential data stored in one place (i.e. hard drive) until you are sure that everything is backed up. No one is going to help you out, but only you. Therefore, what are you going to do in order to get your data and the OS protected?

You might have tried cloning the entire Mac hard drive with single or multiple boot partitions to another hard drive using Disk Utility or any other software. However, how to clone the entire Mac drives at once that have a Windows partition? Although Disk Utility enables to clone Mac partition individually or the entire hard drive at once, you cannot include the Windows partition if it is there. Following are the steps to clone the entire Mac drive along with a Windows partition to an external drive using Disk Utility.

• Attach the destination (external) drive to Mac.
• Launch Disk Utility and select destination drive in the left pane.
• Format the destination drive with Mac OS Extended (Journaled) file system.
• Choose GUID Partition Table as the Partition Map Scheme.
• Restart the Mac and go to Recovery Mode.
• Select Recovery HD and launch Disk Utility.
• Select the source drive (i.e. current boot drive) in Disk Utility and go to ‘Restore’ tab.
• Drag the source drive to the Source field
• Drag the destination drive to the Destination field.

(Before Restore button is clicked, make sure the drives are selected correctly.)

• Click Restore button to start cloning.

After the process is completed, boot from the clone drive to check whether the process to clone Mac partition was successful. However, do you think the clone drive contains the Windows partition? Well, not yet! as the process is not yet finished.  Therefore, restart Mac machine with the original boot drive.

• Launch Disk Utility again, and
• Select the boot camp partition and click ‘New Image’ option in the Disk Utility menu bar.
• Specify a name for the image (.dmg) file.
• Choose a destination to save this image.
• Click Save, and let the process complete successfully.

Now, run Boot Camp Assistant wizard and create a new Windows partition of required size on the clone drive. After the Windows partition is created, click ‘Quit & Install Later’ to exit the Boot Camp Assistant wizard.

Now, restore the image (.dmg) file to newly created Windows partition on the clone drive. Once the image is restored successfully, boot from Windows partition on the clone drive to check whether the process was successful.

If you find difficult to clone boot camp partition using Disk utility app then one could go for many alternatives available in market. Stellar Drive Clone is one such utility used for creating clone and image of Mac drive.