Clone Windows laptop and access it on Mac?

[Akkellan]

I have an old Win 10 laptop and it has programs I can’t get anywhere else on it.

Can I somehow clone the entire HDD in the laptop and boot into it somehow through Bootcamp on Mac?

Like instead of installing a brand new copy of Windows, when setting up Bootcamp, can I select the cloned HDD and boot into it?

 

[Shirasaki]

It will need a whole lot of pain to get there if you want to go that rout.

Because of driver difference, you cannot directly clone windows 10 and expect it will work on Mac without problem. You would need tools to “prepare” your windows to migrate it to another hardware.

And Apple boot camp needs Apple tools to create special booting record for windows Mac dual boot, which regular backup software might not be able to create properly.

Acronis backup provides universal restore feature that I guess might be useful in this scenario, but I haven’t tried that one. What I can suggest is finding online tutorials on how to prepare windows for mass deployment. Usually the last step of those tutorials is to convert windows installation into WIM image. You can then refer to how they deploy image to other machine (ideally with different hardware configuration) to get an idea how migration is done on PC.

Alternatively, you can get parallel desktop or other virtualisation software, clone your current windows install and restore as virtual machine. This is way easier than dealing with bootcamp and all those shenanigans related to it.

 

[haralds]

I have an old Win 10 laptop and it has programs I can’t get anywhere else on it.

Can I somehow clone the entire HDD in the laptop and boot into it somehow through Bootcamp on Mac?

Like instead of installing a brand new copy of Windows, when setting up Bootcamp, can I select the cloned HDD and boot into it?

Use VMWare or Parallels to migrate from the old Laptop. It will take care of machine differences and create a new bootable VM.
You could also use WinClone to create a new BootCamp, but would have to pull the drive and connect it to your Mac. Given it's an older laptop, VM performance should be fine.

I like VMware, because it has been more flexible with various BootCamp configuration. It has a converter tool, which you install on your laptop. More here.