Winclone and Casper Imaging Issues

[plawrence]

I recently purchased Winclone Pro 3.7 to help with deploying dual-boot labs with the Casper Suite, but I am having a problem restoring the Winclone image. Here are the steps I use to create the image:
0) Partition the HDD with 3 partitions: Macintosh HD, Data Disk, Bootcamp (I remove the recovery drive so Bootcamp is disk0s4)
1) Configure my Windows image on the Bootcamp partition
2) Reboot to Macintosh HD
3) Use Winclone to create an image of the Bootcamp partition
4) Winclone -> Tools -> Make Self Extracting
5) Upload the .winclone image to Casper Admin
6) Double-click on a configuration in Casper Admin and make sure the three partitions are listed there
7) Double-click on the Bootcamp partition and choose to install the .winclone image (ticking re-image this partition)
8) Save changes, then netboot a machine and install the configuration

Everything seems to install fine, but when the machine reboots out of the net boot, it just boots to a white screen and instead of the Apple logo there is a 'no-go' symbol. I cant even boot to the Macintosh HD, if I netboot the machine again, Disk Utility says there are no partitions at all!

Any ideas what is going on here?

[rickgmac]

What does it say in the imaging log?

[plawrence]

Casper imaging logs just say Installing [name of win clone image] and then it moves on to restarting the machine. No errors. Are there Winclone logs stored anywhere? I'll check tomorrow

[jyoung]

I was having issues with Winclone Pro 3.6 not applying the bootcamp image. Rolled back to version 3.4 and have not had any issues since. If you can, try going back to a previous version.

[russeller]

When I was doing my dual-boot imaging I pretty much followed your procedure, but I found that if Casper Imaging saw more than one partition on the machine that is going to be imaged it would not partition correctly, or not at all (don't remember). Chances are you are probably testing this process on a Mac that has multiple partitions on it.

I ended up writing a shell script that unmounted all partitions except for the main "Macintosh HD" that would run at startup in the netboot image. You can test this theory by starting your Netboot session, quitting Casper Imaging, launch Disk Utility, unmount any extra partition, then try your imaging. If it works, then you can have a startup script run that will unmount the partitions then the script would launch Casper Imaging when it was done.

[Kumarasinghe]

We are using Winclone and had issues with applying images with Casper Imaging configurations. Instead we apply the image by a script using the command stated here;
http://twocanoes.com/support/winclone/deploying-a-bootcamp-partition-with-winclone-and-apple-remote-...

[plawrence · Accepted solution]

Thanks for all the advice guys. Turns out there is an issue with 8.6 and when restoring a Winclone image the partition you are restoring to needs to be larger than the partition you captured with Winclone (I had been using one the same size). I added an extra 20% to my NTFS partition size and now the image is restoring correctly.