Cloning a bootable drive

[Z. Khalid]

Hello there!

What application software would you recommend using for cloning an HDD/SSD with a bootable partition?

[Doctorandus_P]

dd ?

I don't know which OS you want to uses, but for quite a while it is common for Linux distributions to start from an USB stick. Most of them do this as an easy way to "test drive" them before installation, but there are also Linux distro's that are geared towards system maintenance, hacking or just "use on any computer without install". If you boot from such a media, your SSD is completely unused, which makes it easier to do weird and unusual things with it.

dd is a very simple command line utility that just copies data from one source to another. I assume there are plenty of GUI based tools for this too, but I never looked into them.

[Pilatus]

Macrium Reflect. You might still be able to get the free version, which is being retired in January 2024.

[Z. Khalid]

I'm actually using Windows.
Thank you for your replies guys..

[radiolistener]

on linux you can use gnome-disks

[madires]

Clonezilla live (https://clonezilla.org/).

[BeBuLamar]

I use macrium reflect and it works quite well.

[tunk]

I have cloned some disks using dd from Gparted Live.
If using dd, double-check that you're cloning the "right" way.
If you're cloning from a HDD to an SSD, the SSD manufacturer
may have cloning tools.

[CaptDon]

Norton Ghost works good. Also a program called part.exe is good for managing boot sectors and making a drive 'active' even when DOS or Windows won't let you.

[coppice]

Macrium Reflect. You might still be able to get the free version, which is being retired in January 2024.

Reflect is good, but watch out for the disk having its boot block and bootable flag set up properly. Reflect doesn't touch those. If you make a Windows disk with Reflect and it won't boot, use your recovery disc/USB stick to fix the boot block and bootable flag issues and it will probably be OK.

[HighVoltage]

I have been using ACRONIS for decades, never had a problem.

[coppice]

I have been using ACRONIS for decades, never had a problem.

I've used ACRONIS in the past without problems, but I tried it a few months ago and gave up. When I asked around people told be to use Macrium, and its way better. The visual display of what is going to be copied where is much clearer, and it actually worked, apart from the need to get the bootable flag set on the new drive after the cloning.

[coromonadalix]

for the oldies i use it once in a while

you have the "last practical" Norton Ghost  14.x    who could do that very well, ntfs support etc ... resize  etc ... and you could go inside the ghost file to grab any file you need


hdd raw is not able to resize the image file onto the hdd  you need the same size ...


any software who can do imaging and put it back into any size hdd should be fine,  mileage vary

had good and bad with Acronis

more good results with Macrium Reflect

EaseUs can do partition image  ... with the EaseUS Partition Master ...


and yes like previous thread,  in win10 or Win11   i did saw some problems to read some ooooold partitions in the Win 9x era WinMe Win2k,  you can see the drives partitions but no content

[xrunner]

I have been using ACRONIS for decades, never had a problem.

Same here - it's simple and works.

[madires]

I have been using ACRONIS for decades, never had a problem.

Lucky you! Until around 2010 Acronis was great. After that it went downhill. The best commercial alternative with a similar feature set is Macrium Reflect, as recommended a few times already.

PS: If you have a WD disk you can use a free version of Acronis (Acronis True Image for Western Digital).

[coppice]

I have been using ACRONIS for decades, never had a problem.

Lucky you! Until around 2010 Acronis was great. After that it went downhill. The best commercial alternative with a similar feature set is Macrium Reflect, as recommended a few times already.

PS: If you have a WD disk you can use a free version of Acronis (Acronis True Image for Western Digital).

Many drive makers offer a free version of Acronis, not just WD. You just need one of the relevant make of disk in the system and these versions will happily clone between any disks on the same machine. The snag is Acronis no longer works very well, and completely fails for a lot of people. Macrium is OK. Even though the free version is being killed off, you can get the paid version on 30 day free trial. Since most of us only want to clone once in a long while, that's all we need.

[HighVoltage]

I have been using ACRONIS for decades, never had a problem.

Lucky you! Until around 2010 Acronis was great. After that it went downhill. The best commercial alternative with a similar feature set is Macrium Reflect, as recommended a few times already.

Since I was so happy with Acronis and other tools, I was not even aware of Macrium Reflect
Thanks
Will give it a try

[bingo600]

I've just made an "Image Backup Server" at job.
Deb12 w. NFS and a 8TB Toshiba N300 NAS disk.

But RescueZilla can use "Local Disk" (Ie. USB drive) or CIFS too.

I went with RescueZilla USB Stick  made from ISO w. BalenaEtcher - It's a CloneZilla with a nice Simple GUI.
I didn't try the Clone part , but i'd expect that to work as nicely as Backup / Verify & Restore.

I have just backed up 20 Win10 PC's, 8 Win11 PC's (UEFI active) , and 3 Linux PC's.
No issues ....

I have "Test" restored  a Win10, two Win11 (1 normal & 1 Bitlocker) , and one linux.
No issues ....

I can recommend RescueZilla for the simplicity.

The only thing i had to "hack" ... directly into the Boot ISO (grub menu), was English menu's w. danish kbd.
As it chose US kbd. when selecting english, wo. any possibility to change from the GUI menu. And that doesn't fit our local kbd. layout.
Since i used NFS, i had to use kbd. for NFS server name & mount-point.
I have been using enough US VT220 terms. back in the days .... But my colleagues had issues finding "dash" & "slash".

I have described my previous CloneZilla NVME to NVME "Cloning" here
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/general-computing/linux-mint-21-02-clone-replace-1tb-nvme-with-a-2tb-nvme/msg5063035/#msg5063035
Impressive speed ....

/Bingo