I have a Mac mini with both SSD (256 GB) and HD (500GB). I want to clone the SSD to the HD as a fall back solution if OS X or Bootcamp crash. The cloning of OS X 10.8.5 has worked flawlessly several times using Carbon Copy Cloner. But so far I did not manage to restore a single Windows 7 Pro Bootcamp partition to the Hard Drive. I tried Winclone in the new version, it restored but gave my a partition error in the end. And then I tried Paragon. I have bought Hard Drive Manager 2012 Suite and have made several Rescue USB sticks and Windows PE Boot sticks and DVDs. But whereas they perfectly boot other Windows machines, they don't make it with the Mac. The Recovery Sticks hang in the first screen, neither Mouse nor Enter work. And the Boot DVD hangs after completing the progress bar "Windows is loading files". What went wrong? What can I do?
I'd suggest to create bootable CD, not flash. Mac has different requirements than Windows for bootable media creation, that's why WinPE based RCD may fail to start.
Though it is not fully supported, you can use the Hard Disk Manager from within Windows to back up your entire Disk, we have a universal file system driver within the software which will allow you to recognize your mac based partition, so you can back it up and restore it, the only trick to this is after the restore has been completed you will need to repair the boot loader with the Mac installation disk, from within the Disk Utility.
The problem lies not in the backup part of the process but in the restore. Obviously I cannot restore any Windows boot partition /Bootcamp partition from *within" Windows. I have to do it either with a prgramme running under OSX from the other partition or drive or from any start medium either CD or USB stick. Wehn you write "restore" you probably meant this. But as I mentioned above, my peculiar problem is that no boot device (other from the built in drives) cannot successfully boot anymore.
My problem has been solved: I had to reset the NVRAM / PRAM which defines start up disk selection. After this I could boot from a Paragon USB-Boot-Stick and restore the "good" Windows Botcamp partition backup up on an external Drive to the SSD bootcamp partion. Then I only had to find out which "Windows Partition 3" boot option in rEFIt (they are named the same, whereas the OS X partitons have their proper individual names) leads to the SSD. Now I only hvae to reeinstall those 126 programmes that Secunia tells me on my running rig.
