Trouble migrating Bootcamp partition to external drive

I’m running Winclone 7 on a 2018 MacBook Pro 15. I installed Bootcamp with no additional software and it boots fine. I’m trying to migrate Bootcamp to an external drive and can’t get the external drive to boot. I’ve tried making an image and then restoring to the external drive (single NTFS partition) as well as a volume-to-volume clone.

In each case, the clone / restore succeeds with no errors. From the Mac side, I can see the Window partition on the external drive and all the files seem to be there. However, when I try to boot using the Mac boot manager, I can only see an “EFI BOOT” partition on the external drive (which doesn’t boot). No Windows partition on the external drive shows up as an available option. The original BOOTCAMP and MAC partitions both show up and work fine.

Any suggestions as to what I should try next? Thanks

Please try turning off Secure Boot and also to allow booting from external drives in the recovery partition Startup Security Utility:

tim

Hi,

These were off. The odd thing is that I can get it to work if I don’t use Winclone and just manually install Windows (eg, using WintoGo) onto a hard drive, and then manually install the Bootcamp drivers. Therefore, I don’t think there are any settings that prevent an external boot.

It’s just the Winclone copy or image that doesn’t seem to boot (either restoring to image or direct copy).

So it’s just that the turnkey approach I was hoping for with Winclone doesn’t seem to work

Any other suggestions?

Thanks,

Paul

It is possible that Windows itself is preventing it. I know there is a registry key that sometimes prevents external migration.

tim

Hi,

I searched online but wasn’t to find any info on this key. Do you know what it might be called?

Also, have you been able to successfully clone Bootcamp to an external drive (running High Sierra and Win 10 Pro)?

I’m trying to understand whether there is an issue with my configuration or whether Winclone has problems cloning Win 10 in High Sierra on the newest MacBook Pro’s.

Thanks,

Paul

This registry entry is here:

tim

Sorry… I may be missing something (likely) but I didn’t see any reference to a registry entry in the post you referenced. I’ve actually been following that post, too. It talks about using sysprep and other things to try to get the external drive to boot but I didn’t see anything about a registry key.

Can you point me to registry entry?

Thanks,

Paul

Hi Paul,

Try this one:

https://support.twocanoes.com/hc/en-us/articles/205025389-Running-Windows-from-an-External-Drive?mobile_site=true

There is two nice video links, explaining the BootDriverFlag registry part.

Hope it helps.

BR
Piotr

Hi,

Thanks for your response. I edited the registry setting as per the video and it helped in that my drive now boots. However, after booting, I get the blue Windows 10 spinning wheel and the screen is dark. It never gets past this black screen. I tried using the tools in Winclone to make EFI bootable but that didn’t seem to make any difference.

Any other suggestions?

Thanks,

Paul

1 Like

Do you still have the internal drive? If so, do you have another Mac that doesn’t have a boot camp partition? It would be interesting to see if it boots the external drive.

tim

Hi,

Yes, I still have the drive. So I connected the external drive to my old MacBook and it’s the same result.

It boots to the Windows login (better than before) and then the screen goes black with the spinning Windows blue circle visible if I move the mouse. It stays here forever (for at least 8 hours when I left it overnight once).

The odd thing is that I recall with an old version a while back, it was pretty easy to migrate to an external drive. I just did with no extra configuration and it was okay.

Are you able to get it to work on a 2018 MacBook Pro 15 (eg, migrate boot camp to external drive)?

Thanks,

Paul

I’ll try and let you know.

tim

Hi,

We you able to have any luck migrating the internal bootcamp partition to an external drive?

Thanks,

Paul

I did a bunch of testing on Friday, and regardless of whether the internal drive had a partition or not, it worked fine migrating to a external drive. I did have some driver issues, which I then either ran sysprep from a VM or injected drivers.

tim

Hi Tim,

Thanks for the follow up. I will try again and see if I can get it to work.

To confirm the steps you took…

  1. Did you first do a normal volume-to-volume copy from the internal drive to an external drive?

  2. And then did you run sysprep on the new copy on the external drive via a VM? So did you do this by first using the “create new VM from Bootcamp” function that’s in Parallels and VMware Fusion?

Thanks,

Paul

Paul,

Yes, I did a normal volume to volume copy on a MacMini. The 2018 MacBook Pro had a different block size, so I did a “create image, then restore to external drive” approach. When I booted from the 2018 to external, it had the “inaccessible device” error. That was confusing since I had already injected the drivers to get it to work on the internal drive, so I opened up VMWare Fusion, selected the option to boot directly from a partition, and when it booted up, I ran sysprep (with generalize and shutdown). When the VM powered down after sysprep finished, I booted directly to the external drive, and it booted up fine (though I had to go through setup and give a different username). After it started up, I logged out and logged in as the original user and verified everything was there.

I think the issue on the 2018 MacBook Pro was the interface changed and Windows was not so happy. Sysprep resolved that issue.

FWIW, I used a SanDisk 1TB Extreme: https://amzn.to/2NhWzkQ

tim