Switching Mac and Windows Physical Drives

[MarkLalor]

Hi there!

I have two operating system drives installed in my system: a 500 GB 850 evo that I had initially installed Windows 10 on, and a 250 GB 850 evo that I have got macOS Sierra up and running on. I am sort of realizing now... that I wish I installed Mac on the 500 GB drive and Windows on the 250 GB drive.

Are there any fancy tricks you guys know of that I can use to pull this off? Is a time machine backup good, or do I want to do some other type of cloning? Like... I should theoretically be able to do it with just one extra external hard drive if I like, do a time machine backup to the external drive, copy over windows to the 250 Gb one DIRECTLY from the 500 GB one, and then restore the time machine backup on the 500 GB one. However the whole time machine stuff does not account for Clover bootloader, right? So is there a way to just clone it along with Clover? I feel like I am just missing the details here, does anyone have experience with something like this and can offer me some recommendations? Thanks!

 

[wildwillow]

A third drive (internal or external) would allow you to achieve this. Clone macOS to the third drive and test that you can boot it from your existing EFI/Clover folder. The great thing about Clover is you can just copy the EFI folder to another EFI partition(UEFI boot mode) and then select that drive for primary boot either permanently through the BIOS or using your hotkey(F12). So no need to worry about cloning the bootloader.
Now that macOS is cloned, you can clone Windoze over to the smaller drive and rest is straight forward.

 

[pastrychef]

Yeah, I can't think of any way to do this without a third drive... Here's how I would go about doing this:

1. Shrink the Windows NTFS file system so that it can fit on the 250GB SSD.
2. Clone Windows to your 3rd drive. Clonezilla (Linux), Winclone (Mac), Acronis True Image (Windows) should be able to do this.
3. Clone macOS to the 500GB SSD. Clonezilla (Linux), Carbon Copy Cloner (Mac) should be able to do this. Remember to make sure that your EFI folder in the EFI partition is also copied over to the 500GB SSD.
4. Clone Windows from your 3rd drive to the 250GB.

Just to be safe, I would boot in to each system after cloning to make sure it's working properly.

 

[MarkLalor]

Thanks for the advice @wildwillow and @pastrychef . I'll be sure to be careful with the EFI partition and use the cloning software recommended. I'll tackle this sometime during the week and report back, I'm much more confident thanks to all of your advice!