If you use BootCamp, then you’ve probably heard of or are using Winclone, which will make a full drive backup of your BootCamp partition. Not merely handy when Windows wipes itself out, but also if you need to change drives.

Having a Winclone backup is very reassuring. (Lord knows I’d love to have something so simple for “real” PCs!)

That said, you may easily be lulled into a sense of false security: Winclone will back up your BootCamp partition -as is.-

What that means is that even if your partition isn’t really 100% right, Winclone will happily back it up.

What it -won’t do- with such images is -restore- them… the whole purpose in the first place.

So, here’s what you need to do (and if you didn’t do this the last time you used Winclone, you should probably do it now):

Do this from a BootCamp boot (not from Fusion; not from Parallels):

Boot directly into your Bootcamp OS (XP, Vista, whatever). Run chkdsk on the partition. (There are several ways to do this for each OSen. Command Line; Properties and others. Check online or check your manual.) Run chkdsk again.

(Yes: run it twice… or until it shows a properly working drive.)

Then boot into the bootcamp partition. Once fully booted, choose “shutdown” from the OS. and then do that again (Boot/shutdown.)

NOW do the Winclone backup.

And once you do a successful restore, boot into it a couple of times so that everything “settles down.”

hth

Tracy