I won't be using the external drive for anything else than a backup to restore from. Well, I don't mind as long as I can clone the drive (both partitions) back to the Mac as it was before, and I can carry on booting into OSX or Bootcamp as I like. You mentioned that it won't be possible to boot Windows software from an external drive. Doynton: is this what you meant when talking about free solutions such as DD or Macrium repair disk?

In hindsight I should probably have partitioned the backup drive so that I'd have both a Mac and a Windows (Bootcamp) partition which I'm guessing should have made cloning the Bootcamp partition easier as well. I'm sure I'll find out when I get the computer back. I assume to restore it I need to first have an empty Windows partition available on the Mac hard drive. Anyway I cloned the Mac drive first using Chronosync (which I use for all my backup needs), then ran the above which I understand creates a disk image file of the Windows partition. I was also hoping for a free solution (my Mac is due for repairs and I'd like to make it easy to reinstall everything as it was when I get it back), so I ended up download Paragon Boot Camp Backup which macupdate said was free (turns out 'free' meant a 10 day trial version).

I was hoping I'd find something which would just clone the entire drive (both partitions) in one go. So the Bootcamp cloning process involve creating a separate NTFS partition on the backup drive first, then running the cloning software (which, unlike most regular Mac software can read/write the NTFS format)? Or if your Mac will boot from USB then this is by far the easiest way You could have a look at these to explain dd and Macrium. There is no point paying for software to do such a trivial (OS agnostic) task. I don't know why MacOS people like recommending WinClone, CCC and Paragon. None are that fast mind you but they are free and you end up with an exact copy of your disk that is bootable in both OS. I therefore use either OSX or Linux normally. Older ones (like my 2006 MBP) will not boot Windows software from external USB without a boot loader. Your only consideration is what external device your Mac will boot from. I've used both methods and both work fine on all my Macs (and PCs). Just make sure your destination disk is as big or bigger as your internal one.

None care about the data on the drive be it Windows or OSX or Linux and copy your partitions and partition table just fine.

Or boot from Macrium repair disk (free Windows software) and clone it. There are dozens of applications you can run to do this or you can even buy hardware to do it.īoot from external drive and run one. You want to clone your disk not image it.

Clone mac hard drive to ssd