WInclone 5 and 6 and WIndows 7: HD to SSD SOLVED

Winclone
1

I hope my experience will save someone time as it took me 1 day to figure this out.

I have to change out the HD in about 8 IMACS models 2013 to 2014 usually running OS 10.10 to 10.13.

We have them exclusively using Windows 7 to run medical software and cannot upgrade to Windows 10. We do not even run them as Macs (hence the old MacOs)

I decide to give all the terminals a kick by changing out the HD to SSD. Cloning the BOOTCAMP of each Imac and copy to the new SSD is ideal. I used Crucial Drives.

I got Winclone 5 and was able to move over one SSD with no problem.

When I then tried two other Imacs: I ran into issues.

  1. I tried booting Windows from the SSD but either it would not boot, gets a boot into safe mode screen and then a blue screen before a crash.

  2. I tired multiple clonings after multiple runs of chkdsk, etc. I turned off SIP. I did EFI and Legacy clones. I did not want to SYSprep the Windows (might as well just install clean).

I read all the advice on the forum, etc.

I could not understand why it worked the first time but not the second.

Until I read a post about how booting windows from a external drive might be an issue since Windows wants to boot from the internal drive and if cannot, it will crash.

I then took out the HD and popped in the SSD and BOOM! it worked! ( the SSD auto ran chkdsk and then added a driver).

In the first SSD I moved, I had used “select startup disk” to choose the Windows bootcamp but probably choose the old one (you cannot tell which Windows you are using) and thinking it worked, I switched out the drive.

In the second and third Imac, I used ALT at startup to choose the WINDOWS drive (since you can see which are the HD and the SSD drives) and choosing the SSD windows, it failed to boot.

I look forward now to change out the remaining 5 Imacs in my office.

2

Nice.

Updating to say 10.13 on the Mac side with the latest security updates would give you boot rom updates.

If these are 27" iMacs and you want to put a NVMe SSD in them then having an updated Boot ROM before installing the SSD is important. Though putting a blade SSD whilst it will give better performance is a lot more work than simply replacing the HDD with a SSD. If these are 21.5" they can only have a blade SSD installed if it came with one from the factory, so most likely replacing the HDD with a SATA SSD would be your only option.

If you want the very latest Boot ROM you might need Mojave or newer with all security updates. However Mojave requires Winclone 7 or Winclone 8, so you would probably want to see if installing Mojave to an external drive updated the Boot ROM so you could leave High Sierra on the internal drive.

3

These are 21" IMacs. We never use the MacOs side, so they are left as Windows 7 machines.

Why you ask? We use a medical electronic software called Medinotes E which was last updated in 2012 and only runs on Windows. (In Windows 10, the software overtasks the CPU!) The Imacs were perfect all in one computers in examination rooms.

I do have an Imac 27" 2013 with a hybrid drive I want to update (and figure this out) But that will stay Mac for my pleasure.

I am not worried about lack of Windows 7 support. The computers are behind a Watchguard Firewall and, in 15 years I never have had a virus (but lots of web trackers!)

Thanks!