Cloning Windows HD using DD

Brickwizard

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Right boys and girls, something I haven't done before..
A mate has [and don't swear at me] a W10 laptop on which he has filled the HD,
I have a bootable image of MX-linux on a pen drive Can I use this and the DD comand to clone his current W10 drive to a new bigger one?
I already have USB2 &usb3 to Satta cables to piggyback the new drive into the system
Bwiz

[oh and the name is Brian..yes another one]
 


Done it many times, with many OS's. (Solaris, BSD, Linux, Windows)
It's a bit copier.
 
I just read this again. So depending on which filesystem, and partitioning scheme you use
you will have extend the OS partitions to the larger drive. dd will just copy the same filesystem
to a larger drive. It won't "see" the rest of the drive.

There are some gotchas with larger drives. If it's over 2TB you probably want to make sure
you have a UEFI type computer, and hopefully your drive has a GPT parition table, and not
a MS/DOS partition table. There are some ways around this, but it's a pain.

It doesn't matter how the newer/bigger drive is formatted. It's going to bit copy whatever
was on the original drive.
 
i've been playing with rsnapshot and timeshift on Arch to a usb stick, with issues so currently trying dd (as a back up) as follows:sudo dd if=/dev/sda of=/run/media/andrew/time/backup.img bs=64M conv=sync,noerror status=progress

Arch is on /dev/sda4 and is mounted but got no warnings(so far)the usb stick 60 gig is mounted at /run/media/andrew/time i'm doing as an .img

im getting a nice update of progress as it goes

i was thinking @brickwizard could your hand not slip and you say something like "sorry about that but obviously a higher power decied it was time for you to switch to mx-linux"
 
Last edited:
it was time for you to switch to mx-linux
Five years ago he bought his M$ laptop to me and asked me to get rid of the windows and put something else on, as he had never had anything else, I installed Mint+mate, I told him to forget anything windows and do not try and load any windows programs without asking me first, in less than a week he was on the phone, this F***ing computer is no good what you put on it dosn't work, it wouldn't load anything, now it won't boot ...what have you been doing to it? I asked "" I was trying to load my camera and printer programs and others I use..."" I did not bother to try and educate him I put M$ back on it, he wont listen he doesn't want to learn anything new and goes ape S**t when anything goes wrong
I was hoping that cloning his drive would be painless [ I have cloned my own nix drives using DD and they have been fine]
 
lol thats mates for you ..well i guess if you copy from small hd no problem, if it can't be done they just carry on a it was. My heads i but fussy today and as we speak doing a dd, i could have sworn that really my laptop which i'm cloning from should not be mounted ,but its done 13gig so far and not a peep of warnings dd seems much faster than rsnapshpot and timeshift
 
As memory serves (obviously untested by me personally) CloneZilla works wonders with Windows drives/partitions.
 

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