Backing up a Windows 7 Boot Camp installation and restoring it to a smaller partition.

I had set up a Boot Camp installation yesterday for a user, who wanted to use it for both dual-booting and so he could use VMWare (using the Boot Camp partition for the VMWare Windows install.) I’d set it for 100 GBs (20%) of the disk and delivered it, but I got a follow-up email from the user asking if the Windows partition could be made smaller (50 GBs).

Since there’s no easy way I know of to shrink a Windows partition (plenty of options if you want to grow it), I was looking at a multi-hour re-install of Windows 7 which I had just done.

That’s when I remembered my (possible) savior: Winclone . The venerable tool was no longer being updated, but it could still save my bacon. At least, that’s what my hope was.

After some Googling, I happened across this Apple Discussion thread and saw Toocool4‘s post at the bottom of the thread. That was the key information I needed and it helped me immeasurably with avoiding the pain of reinstalling Windows 7 again. See below the jump to get the procedure I used.