Booting to Bootcamp partition after restoring from Winclone image results in a blank screen

Winclone
1

Hi there,

I purchased Winclone 8 to restore a Windows 8 Bootcamp partition on a 2012 27" iMac running 10.15.7. The iMac had a failing 1.12TB Fusion Drive and the data was being cloned to a 2TB SSD being installed into the machine. I was able to clone over the macOS portion of the drive no problem. However, I’ve been having the worst time trying to get a bootable clone of the Bootcamp partition to work. I have confirmed that the Bootcamp partition on the original Fusion Drive is bootable, so I know the source is not the problem. Here’s where the situation currently stands:

  1. I booted to an external drive with macOS 10.15.7 and a copy of Winclone installed on it. From there, I created an image of the original Bootcamp partition using Winclone. There were no errors during image creation.
  2. I installed the 2TB SSD into the machine and then booted again to my external drive. From there, I restored from the image created in step 1 to an exFAT-formatted partition on the 2TB SSD. There were no errors during image restore.
  3. I rebooted the machine and held down Alt/Option to bring up the boot menu. The boot menu shows a partition labeled “Macintosh HD” and a partition labeled “EFI” instead of the normal “BOOTCAMP”. When “EFI” is selected, the machine boots to a black screen with a spinning circle of dots for a while, then goes to a completely black screen, no blinking cursor.

It looks like something is preventing Windows from getting to the login screen. I figured it might be a drivers issue, so I tried injecting the drivers for Windows 8 downloaded from Apple’s website here (as far as I can tell, these are the correct drivers for this machine and Windows 8). This unfortunately didn’t resolve the issue. To get to this point, I’ve attempted numerous other things such as doing a volume-to-volume clone in Winclone as well as swapping between EFI and Legacy boot.

I’m at a total loss as to why I can successfully boot to the original Bootcamp partition but cannot successfully restore a bootable copy of that partition using this software.

2

We are working on this in the slack channel i believe.

tim