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Transfer full image of MacBook Pro Windows 7 partition to a Mac mini Windows 7 partition

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I simply want to make double sure before I buy another Windows 7 and an additional Acronis licenses that what I have in mind is indeed possible.

As per title, I intend to transfer all my Windows 7 partition of my MacBook Pro to my new Mac mini Windows 7 partition. If I clone my MacBook Pro Windows 7 partition on an external harddisk, will I be able to transfer that clone to my Mac mini (on Windows 7) as is INCLUDING all my software already installed. This is the part that I am unsure of after reading the documentation. Some of my software are not existing anymore and I dont have an archive of some of my downloads, hence I would loose them. 

Thank you for any clarifications regarding this.

Best regards,

Jean-Claude

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Hello Jean-Claude, I don't have any direct experience of working with Windows 7 when installed on a Mac system but from reading the following Microsoft Support article https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/2647609 - there looks to be a lot of preparation that is needed to enable this to be actioned, assuming you intend using BootCamp as described in the article.

If we assume that you have performed the preparation work to create the Windows 7 partition on the new Mac mini, then I would further assume that you could then restore an image of your MacBook Pro Windows 7 partition to that new Mac min Windows 7 partition.

What happens next is a question mark!  

When you boot the Mac mini Windows 7 partition you may be asked for additional device drivers that are needed for that system for devices not present in the MacBook Pro.

Unless you have a full (non OEM) license for Windows 7 on the MacBook Pro, then you will have potential Windows Activation issues.  OEM versions of Windows OS are licensed to specific hardware and are not transferable, so at a minimum you will need a valid license key to use on the Mac mini system.

If you are able to boot into the new Mac mini Windows 7 system and get past any activation & device driver issues, then you should be good to go as far as your installed Windows software applications are concerned - unless any of these are licensed to the specific hardware signature of your MacBook Pro system.

You may want to post this question in the Acronis True Image for Mac Forum to get advice from those with greater knowledge of the Mac platform.

From what I've read, transfrering bootcamp partitions is not generally supported on Macs (natively) and I have not tried myself.  There are others showing that it can be done with third party tools.  If you can partition the Mac Mini correctly ahead of time, in theory, it should work and I would think that Acronis is capable of doing this. 

However, as a Mac user, I have primarily stuck with the native recovery tools in OS X and also had good luck.  From personal experience, I know that you can boot to existing drives as external drives, or completely restore time machine or system images from one mac to another and they work fine.  In my office environment, I routinely use OS X built in recovery menu to take a full system image (select the hard drive at the root, not any parition) and push the image back to another internal hard drive, or an external drive and you can boot to the drive by holding "options/ alt" after you hear the start chime when you power on from a full shutdown.  For this to work correctly though, since you will be modifying the internal disk, you want to boot to an external UsB recovery/installer and use that to complete the actions of creating the .dmg image file and restoring it to another internal hard drive.  Also, I stick with the Yosemite recovery menu because El Capitan no longer lets you take full disk images with just the used data (you have to take an image of the entire disk in El Capitan and that is not ideal)  This limitation is not in Yosemite recovery and you can use Yosemite recovery to push an El Cap image back too.

I would imagine you can do this with Aronis on a Mac as well as long as you take a full disk image and don't fine copying everything from the old Mac to the new one.  (others in this post are expressing frustiona though:  https://forum.acronis.com/forum/83012) If it works, you could then format the Mac partition and start it from scratch or leave it as is and it should work (especially if you're already running 10.11.X El Capitan.  Before you do anything though, to be on the safe side, take a full Mac disk image with OS X and/or Acronis, and maybe even a time machine image.  IF things go south, you will have options to restore the Mac Mini back to original and try again.