How I upgraded my Bootcamp drive

It is a challenge to upgrade a Mac that has bootcamp installed. The problem is that the Mac uses one way of partitioning drives (EFI) and windows uses another (BIOS/MBR). I have Windows 7, so it uses BCD, too.

I’ve only done this once successfully, so your results may vary. However, this is the tactic I used:

1. Get an external drive dock (I used EZ-DOCK for 19 bucks from microcenter).
2. Install the new drive.
3. Boot off the external drive’s mac partition (hold option key down during boot).
4. Format the new internal drive.
5. Clone the mac partition onto the new drive (I used Disk Utility’s “restore” feature I think. Or maybe asr from the command line? I tried so many variations that didn’t work it’s hard to remember)
6. Reboot onto the internal (freshly cloned) drive
7. Run bootcamp assistant and resize to make room for the bootcamp + data partition
8. Don’t reboot. Instead go to disk utility and remove that partition, creating two in its place (both FAT32). The last one is BOOTCAMP.
9. I may have started to re-install Win 7 and then aborted by forcibly powering off the machine
10. Insert Win 7 install DVD and reboot. Select Recovery console.
11. I may have used PARTDISK here I don’t remember. Then format the internal BOOTCAMP partition to ntfs (use /Q option or you’ll be waiting for hours).
12. Use ROBOCOPY to clone the external BOOTCAMP disk onto internal BOOTCAMP partition: ROBOCOPY E:\ C:\ /e /efsraw /copyall /dcopy:t /r:0 It gave me 16 directories and 4 files that failed to copy… I’m ignoring that…
13. Use the recovery tool to fix boot problem
14. Boot onto internal windows drive. Select “Windows 7 ultimate (recovered)”. It boots!
15. Use bcdedit to remove broken boot entry.
16. Microsoft office doesn’t seem to work right, so I ran “repair” on that installation. Found out what one of those files that didn’t copy is, I guess…
17. Used ROBOCOPY again to copy all the files on my DATA partition. (I leave data as FAT32 so I can access it from Mac side, too.)