Winclone, Windows 10, Boot Camp, and Casper?

[omatsei]

I have a new iMac running El Capitan, and I used Boot Camp Assistant to create a partition and install Windows 10. I booted to it, installed the boot camp drivers, installed one piece of software, uninstalled a bunch of the stupid crap that Windows 10 insists on installing, ran sysprep, then rebooted into the Mac side. I ran Winclone 5.5 Pro, selected the Boot Camp partition, saved an image, made it self-extracting, and copied it into Casper. During the imaging process, it looks like it's doing something, but the boot camp partition formats as FAT instead of NTFS (despite NTFS being selected in the configuration), and no data exists on it. I'm testing this process on an older iMac, from late-2013 (I think). It did not have El Capitan on it, but it does now, and I disabled SIP just to be sure.

Has anyone gotten Windows 10 deployed via Winclone and Casper, onto a Boot Camp partition? (When I put it like that, it sounds awfully niche...)

[stevevalle]

At a guess, it sounds like the Winclone image is larger than the partition you are trying to install onto. You may need to shrink the file system (Tools menu, Shrink Windows (NTFS) File System).

Twocanoes have a guide to configuring El Capitan Dual Boot Macs with Casper that might help.
http://twocanoes.com/winclone/support/using-jamf-casper-suite-and-winclone-pro-to-image-a-lab-of-dua...

[omatsei]

The image is only 6.5gb, but the partition is 400gb. I followed that guide to the letter, actually, and it still isn't working.

[russeller]

Have you tried disabling SIP? We tried to install from a Winclone PKG and if the OS was 10.11 it wouldn't ever install properly until SIP was disabled. This is also an interesting read about SIP from TwoCanoes http://twocanoes.com/pages/el-capitan that shows how Apple does the Boot Camp Assistant by creating a temporary partition.

[Look]

A couple of things.
As already mentioned you need SIP disabled.
You can make the WinClone into a completely self configuring package (I think) so it will even cut of a piece of the partition.
if you do successfully get it down, you may still need to run Winclone under OS X and use the "Make EFI bootable" option.

[omatsei]

We have disabled SIP on the "target" machines. We found that uploading the Winclone package through Casper Admin was zipping the file. We had to unzip it, then re-open Casper Admin and create new BOMs. Once that was done, we could add it to the configuration, and it would partition correctly and copy the files. However, even then, it wouldn't boot.

On the "source" machine, where we first installed Windows manually, ran sysprep, etc., the Boot Camp partition is bootable. Do we need to do anything on the "target" machines with Winclone, outside of the Casper workflow?

[omatsei]

We figured out what the problem was... We never made the Winclone image EFI bootable. Once we did that, it booted no problem.

[m_donovan]

omatsei, Could I get your workflow for the entire process? All of our staff machines are dual boot and the process we are currently using is very cumbersome.

[dan_ruiz]

Hey @omatsei ,

The process and issue we are running into is nearly identical to yours, only difference being that we are using a mix of brand new macs (Late 2016) and slightly older macs (Early 2015), and using Winclone Pro 6.

I've noticed that Casper Admin zipped the winclone file upon upload as well. Was unzipping it a necessary step? And I apologize for my ignorance, but what are you referring to when you had to create new "BOMs"?

We tried to make the .winclone file EFI bootable, but the option is grayed out. We also made the actual BootCamp drive EFI bootable before saving it to an image, and that also did not work.

If you could provide some insight or maybe just provide an overview on what exactly you did, that would be super helpful. I've been at this for a little while now and really just want to get this figured out lol

[omatsei]

Yes, we had to unzip it. I'm still not quite sure why Casper Admin zips a pkg file when you copy it in, but I unzipped it manually, outside of Casper Admin. When I re-opened Casper Admin, it said it found a new package and wanted to create a Bill of Materials for it, and had 2 options, either "Cancel" or "Create BOMs". I hit Create BOMs and it all went swimmingly.

I'm glad to help where I can... I'm certainly not an expert at this stuff. I've only done it once, and working on my second attempt now that Win10 has been out for a while.