I recently replaced my hdd in my mid-2012 macbook with an ssd. I wasn’t aware that I couldn’t boot my Bootcamp partition from the old hdd which is now an external harddrive, so I purchased Winclone (legacy version 7) to clone the partition onto the internal ssd to make sure I could boot from it. It appears this isn’t possible without the pro upgrade. Am I not understanding this correctly? I need to be able to move the Bootcamp partition to the new ssd and boot from it to use my laser as its software only runs on windows. Help!?
I did something similar a few months ago, with my 2012 Mac Mini. I took the extra step of getting (from OWC) the hardware needed to enable me to mount both my old spinning HD and my new SSD inside the Mini’s chasis, so because it was an “internal” drive, I was able to still boot from the old Windows partition on the spinner. However, I wanted to take advantage of the SSD’s speed and went through the process of transferring everything from the spinner’s MacOS and Windows partitions to the SSD, which I was able to do successfully using Carbon Copy Cloner for the MacOS stuff, and Winclone 8 for Windows.
After successfully cloning the MacOS to the new drive, and getting things running there properly, I made a “File Based” Winclone of my old Windows partition, using Winclone 8. “File based” is necessary because the block size used by an SSD is different than that used on a spinning HD, so even though block based Wincloning is faster to perform, for this specific purpose, a File Based Winclone is required.
The other necessary thing is to obtain the necessary drivers that enable Windows to recognize and run from an SSD. The MacOS’s “Bootcamp Utility” has the option to download a file containing all Windows drivers for your particular machine, and if you are running the MacOS from your SSD, this package will include the SSD drivers for Windows. Winclone 8 has the feature that allowed me to “inject” the SSD drivers directly into my File Based Winclone file that I had made from my old spinner’s Windows partition. Once that was done, I had a File Based clone of my Windows partition, which also had the SSD drivers that would let it run on my new SSD. After creating a new partition on the SSD, using the MacOS’s Disk Utility, I simply “restored” my Winclone to the new partition on my SSD. This completed without issue, and the injected drivers were recognized and implemented along with the rest. I can boot from, and run Windows from my internally mounted SSD.
I suspect that your problems are coming from one or both of these issues: either you are attempting to restore from a “Block Based” Winclone, or you have not obtained the SSD drivers for Windows, or both. I am not sure whether Winclone 7 has the ability to “inject” the drivers - you may need to pay for an upgrade to a more recent version, but I believe you can do what you want to do without getting a “Pro” license. Perhaps Tim will chime in here with further clarification or corrections.
You can not boot directly into the external boot camp partition. Solution is install VM (I use Parallels), on external Mac OS. Boot to external Mac OS open the VM and Windows will work fine on external hard drive with VM configured to the boot camp portion on external hard drive. In a pinch there is free trial version of Parallels