Winclone, partitions, 10.6 upgrade

Hi everyone. First post here. I've read through lots of threads about Winclone, backups, partitions, etc., but I still don't quite feel secure in what I'm trying to do. I'm going to spell out what I have, what I want, and how I think I can get there, and I am hoping that I can get a thumbs-up or thumbs-down for my plan of attack, rather than posting here in a panic after I brick everything.

HAVE:
-- MacBookPro5,3, 2.8GHz Duo, 8Gb RAM, running 10.5.8 and XPSP3
-- internal 500Gb drive, with an 80Gb NTFS Bootcamp partition, the rest MacOS
-- external 1Tb drive, with a 32Gb FAT32 partition, the rest MacOS
-- another external 1Tb drive, with a 350Gb NTFS partition, the rest MacOS
-- current, complete Time Machine backups on both external drives. The Time Machine backup includes a Winclone-created clone file of the Bootcamp partition.
-- install discs for WinXP, the system-restore discs that came with my MBP, and the upgrade disc for 10.6.


WANT:
OS upgrade to 10.6.
internal drive repartitioned to 120Gb NTFS, remainder MacOS
no lost data!


PLAN:
I don't want to trust the Winclone clone file without verifying it. So I'm attempting a restore of the Windows image to one of the external drives right now (35%, probably another hour or so to complete). Once that is done, these are the steps I plan to take:

(1) Use Bootcamp Assistant to repartition my internal drive to 100% Mac, then repartition again to 120Gb NTFS / remainder MacOS.
(2) Use Winclone to restore the cloned Windows image to the expanded partition.
(3) Restart into MacOS and make sure everything's okay.
(4) Restart into Windows and make sure everything's okay.
(5) Reboot using the 10.6. upgrade disc and perform the upgrade.
(6) Restart into MacOS and make sure everything's okay.


QUESTIONS:
(1) Any obvious problems with this plan?
(2) I am aware that Winclone doesn't work under 10.6 and is no longer being developed. So for the future, I assume I have to back up my Bootcamp partition using the XP backup tool and the large NTFS partition on one of the external drives. Is that correct?


Thank you for indulging my paranoia... any thoughts are welcome.

While I've seen reports of others having issues, I have personally had zero issues restoring my win partitions using Winclone within Snow Leopard.

With a new drive I have restored from my SuperDuper! backup - you would do a clean install here with SL or do the upgrade install.
Then used the BootCamp Assistant to create the BC partition and formatted it as NTFS (I have Paragon's NTFS for Mac - don't know if that's what enables me to format as NTFS from Disk Utility or not).
Then used Winclone to restore from the backup.

I've done the above 3 times already this year - I am running Win 7 - 32 bit in the BC partition - and use VMWare for my XP install.

Interesting – that's the first I've heard of Winclone working under 10.6 at all. I'd still be nervous about trying it, given that it seems to hose the partition map, but maybe I'll try restoring on one of the external drives and see how it goes. It sure would be nice to do all my backups through Time Machine.

I can confirm using WinClone under 10.6 with Win7 without an issue also.

I've been thinking that having your Winclone backup on a NTFS partition may be a part of the key, but I have not been able to verify this. I just have not read enough of the reports about it not working to decipher where other's problems may have been.

I've been thinking that having your Winclone backup on a NTFS partition may be a part of the key, but I have not been able to verify this. I just have not read enough of the reports about it not working to decipher where other's problems may have been.

Click to expand...

I can confirm your thoughts. Winclone has a tendency to trash the partition map or boot sector when attempting to clone FAT-32 to FAT-32. The problem arises because it sometimes can not "fit" (in other words, expand or contract) the partition boundary correctly with FAT-32. Another strong reason to always use NTFS for a Boot Camp partition.