What the hell is WinClone Anyway?

WinClone is an OS X Leopard only program that will allow you to Clone your Windows partition and re-image it onto another hard drive, or just have an image for backup. in case something does happen to your hard drive.

WinClone is a very basic tool that will allow you to choose which Windows Partition, FAT32 or NTFS to backup and will create a DMG image of that partition. If you do not choose a windows partition it will go ahead and tell you that the selected partition is not a Windows partition, this is helpful in case you have a couple hard drives named the same thing (as is the case with me).

Additionally, when I was playing with my Vista partition and doing an image, an Error came up saying that I had to run CHKDSK /F on the drive, otherwise WinClone would not create the image. Most would think that this is ridiculous, but it is a nice feature. Since it does check to see if the hard drive needs to be checked, this would save you from having a broken image when you need it the most.

In addition to creating an image, WinClone can also restore the saved image to a partition. I would assume you could also restore this image to an entire hard drive to move that image to another machine. But be weary, since Microsoft does like to have checks in place to limit this type of activity.

For a free program that only does one function, it does it quite well. I would recommend this to anybody who has a windows partition that they would like to preserve a state or move to a new hard drive. The only negative aspect is the length of time to create and restore images, but with so much data it is understandable. Maybe the time is related to an Apple Bus driver problem or something.

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