Migrating bootcamp to external drive

I’ve cloned a bootcamp partition with winclone, and restored to an external drive(wd external ssd). When I go to ‘startup disk’ in the system preferences, it is not listed (and neither is the internal drive actually). When I hold option on boot, the internal bootcamp drive is visible, but the external drive is not. Any ideas how to get external drive to show up? I’m trying to free up the internal drive space to give it all back to os x. Running 10.13.3 on 2014 15" mbp.

It is very strange that the internal drive is not listed as well, and I suspect there is something else going on. Try rebooting and holding down the option key to show the startup manager. Apple explains it in detail here:

tim

If I hold down alt at startup, the internal drive shows up. A usb stick with the os x installer also shows up, but the newly created windows clone does not. I tried also making a ‘sysprep’ version, but that didn’t show up either.

I guess it is possible that the 2014 Mac doesn’t support external booting for Windows.

Ok, so I removed the tuxera NTFS driver, and now in system preferences the external boot drive shows up as a choice. However, when I select it and reboot, it just shows a black screen with:
“No bootable device – insert boot disk and press any key”. I’m now trying the ‘make legacy bootable’ command from winclone, but its been running for hours… Is it supposed to take a long time?

I gave it one more go, where I again wiped the drive and then tried to make the copy. I now get a bit further, but after some time, windows goes to a blue screen with ‘INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE’ as the error. Any more suggestions?

Try these steps:

tim

I tried all such things. Even made the sysprep image. Still just get “INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE”. Any other ideas?