# Can you clone a NTFS partition to new drive?



## jdurston (Jan 28, 2005)

I may be switching internal drives in my MacBook soon. I'm concerned about being able to transfer my Windows XP boot camp partition while maintaining “bootability”.

Will this process work:

-Buy a USB/SATA 2.5” enclosure
-Install new drive in enclosure
-Create HFS+ partition on new drive
-Clone my old OS X to my new drive's HFS+ partition
-Can I use disk utility/super duper to clone my NTFS formatted XP partition to a partition on the new drive?


I would like to not have to go through the hassles of setting XP up again. (Installing programs, anti-virus, numerous updates, activation, setting up printers and network drives, associating with my workplace Domain.)

Has anyone done anything similar?


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## madgunde (Mar 10, 2006)

Disk Utility might be able to clone it. On the "Restore" tab, drag your source and destination drives or volumes and click "Restore".

Not 100% sure if it will do NTFS partitions, but I don't really see why not.


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## jdurston (Jan 28, 2005)

Disk utility won't let me drag my NTFS partition to the source box in the restore tab.


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## jdurston (Jan 28, 2005)

I'm trying to figure out if this will work for me.

http://www.bombich.com/mactips/dualboot.html

Is this process compatible with XP pro?


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## Alex Sanders (Jun 13, 2003)

Don't know about the method you were describing on the previous post, but I do know that Norton Ghost is good at cloning partitions under NTFS.
Found this forum discussion as well, but don't know how much help it will be.

http://forum.onmac.net/archive/index.php/t-1001.html


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## Guest (Nov 9, 2006)

I'd use ghost for sure, OSX can't deal with a lot of super important things in NTFS, such as all the file permissions .. so even if you could figure out a way to clone it from OSX, I don't think it would work as expected in windows.


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## jdurston (Jan 28, 2005)

jdurston said:


> I'm trying to figure out if this will work for me.
> 
> http://www.bombich.com/mactips/dualboot.html
> 
> Is this process compatible with XP pro?



Success, I installed XP under bootcamp. Created an image while booted into OS X using NetRestore Helper. Deleted the NTFS partition. Recreated a bigger partition using Boot Camp. Formatted the partition as NTFS with any windows installer CD. Powered off the computer. Rebooted into OS X. Used NetRestore to copy the image back to the new NTFS partition. Booted into windows. 

It ran check disk the first time and rebooted once and then it was fine. All my applications and none of the setup hassles.


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## gordguide (Jan 13, 2001)

A bit for bit copy of the drive (forensic duplication with write-blocking) would work, of course, but you would be stuck with the same disk format (ie if you had two 30GB partitions on a 60GB disk, you can copy onto a new 200GB disk but will end up with two 30GB partitions and free space of 140GB).

Since Apple uses a GUID Partition Table (GPT) and Windows XP -32 cannot use a GPT map at all and can only boot from a MBR (Master Boot Record) partition **, there is some voodoo in BootCamp to overcome this.

When a MBR is used on an x86 system, it is the first partition (partition 0) of the drive. Windows expects to see it there to boot. Somehow, BootCamp manages to fool Windows into seeing the MBR where it expects to see it; my guess is that it is written in free space at the beginning of your OSX disk, (or inside the existing partition 0) but I could be wrong. They might write it at the end, where XP is actually installed.

However, there are no standard methods to deal with a disk that has both GPT and MBR; hence BootCamp. If you wan't the backup to be bootable, either you have to deal with these issues (probaby requires a trip to the command line at some point) or find a way to create and then copy your NTFS drive image to the new empty NTFS partition on the new disk. Whether this will work or not is anyone's guess, since Windows won't boot from an external disk you just have to try it and see or seek out others that have done it sucessfully.

Getting over Windows' inability to use GPT is what BootCamp is all about, so run BootCamp on the new drive before you try to install anything is mandatory.

** Windows-32 and Windows-64 limits only; Windows for Itanium uses GPT. But, you don't have Windows for Itanium and it won't run on an Intel Core/Core 2 Duo CPU anyway.


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