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I do SSD upgrades for iMacs and other pre-2020 Macs. I need to find out how to migrate a drive running MacOS12 Monterey with a BootCamp partition to a new SSD. Did anyone do this successfully, and if so how did you go about it, please?
iMac, OS X 10.11
I did something like this with my 2017 iMac a couple of years ago, when I had the hard disk element of the Fusion drive upgraded to SSD. Before sending it away, I had cloned the Mac side using Carbon Copy Cloner (though I could have used the Time Machine backup) and made an image of the Bootcamp partition using Winclone. Having restored the Mac partition, installint the OS then using Migration Assistant, I used Bootcamp Assistant to create a Bootcamp partition, but stopped at that point and booted back into Mac. From there I used Winclone (a Mac-only program) to restore the Bootcamp image to the Bootcamp partition. I had previously done exactly the same thing when I replaced the hard disk on my 2013 Macbook Pro with a SSD. It worked perfectly on both occasions.
I did something like this with my 2017 iMac a couple of years ago, when I had the hard disk element of the Fusion drive upgraded to SSD. Before sending it away, I had cloned the Mac side using Carbon Copy Cloner (though I could have used the Time Machine backup) and made an image of the Bootcamp partition using Winclone. Having restored the Mac partition, installint the OS then using Migration Assistant, I used Bootcamp Assistant to create a Bootcamp partition, but stopped at that point and booted back into Mac. From there I used Winclone (a Mac-only program) to restore the Bootcamp image to the Bootcamp partition. I had previously done exactly the same thing when I replaced the hard disk on my 2013 Macbook Pro with a SSD. It worked perfectly on both occasions.
Hi John, thank you so much for this detailed explanation of the process, I will give it a shot using the tools you pointed out. Also, I was wondering how this would be done with a Parallels application running Windows versus the Bootcamp partition.
Regards, Jurgen
With Parallels, the clone will have saved the PVM virtual environment in the Parallels folder. For security, I also tend to save it to an external drive. It is not a good idea to back it up with Time Machine. You need to exclude it as it changes every time it is used and the whole thing needs to be backed up. If you are reinstalling to the SSD on the same computer, it should be enough to restore the clone, and Parallels and Windows should already be in place and fully licensed. The headache would come if you tried to restore the PVM to a different computer. If moving from Intel to ARM processor, it is impossible as a different version of Windows is used. Moving from Intel Bootcamp to Intel Parallels is possible by installing Windows 11 from Parallels then, in Windows, dragging items from the Bootcamp volume. I found it easier to reinstall things like Microsoft Office. Winclone does not really help if you are using Parallels, as it is designed to back up and restore a Bootcamp partition, and it can't see or write to the PVM virtual environment. Best of luck.
Thank you again for your reply, John. So if I understand you correctly, in this situation, where Parallels contains the virtual machine, you would NOT use Time Machine at all to create the backup to restore from, but would use CCC only? Not sure what you mean when you say that you would also save the Parallels folder to an external drive. Am I not cloning the whole thing using CCC to the new SSD drive ( which is external until I install it) , so why would I have another CCC clone for the PVM on yet another external drive? This new SSD is going to replace the old lame HDD in the iMac, and I intend to test the SSD of course externally before I open up the iMac to replace the old HDD. I am not sure yet if the HDD in this 2015 A1418 is part of a fusion drive or not, so it is essential that I can boot off the new SSD before I undo the fusion setup inside.
The point about excluding Parallels from the Time Machine backup was just that, in continuing day-to-day use, the whole PVM will be backed up every time you use it, imposing pressure on Time Machine and its hardware. For a single restore, Time Machine ought to do it though, in my case, I prefer to use the clone because Time Machine is on a network drive. My only reason for saving the extra copy of the PVM is additional security for the Windows environment. I would first check whether you have a Fusion drive. Restoring the Fusion drive is quite important with a new SSD as the SATA connection has its limitations. All the best, Jurgen!
Hi John, thank you so much for this detailed explanation of the process, I will give it a shot using the tools you pointed out.
Hi John, would you also have any thoughts on migrating Windows in a Parallels setup?
Migrating OS12 with a bootcamp partition to new SSD
