
It's called fdisk because - vezzy-fnord
http://www.dadhacker.com/blog/?p=2402
======
algorithmsRcool
My technique for windows since vista has been :

1) Plug both disks into a host machine (or boot up off of a WinPE or WinRE
disk).

2) Mount the source them as D:\ in this example

3) Format the destination disk in diskpart and mount as E:\ (be sure to mark
active and format as a primary partition)

4) Run robocopy D:\ E:\ /x /e /COPYALL /zb /r:1 /w:0 (or something similar

5) wait...

6) verify that the copy didn't miss anything

7) Run bootsect e:\ /nt60

8) Try to boot from the new drive, if it doesn't work then try 'bootmgr
/rebuildbcd' and fixboot

it's not sector level, but i don't think it really needs to be, just mirror at
the file level and fix up the boot sector. I'm not sure if it is dangerous but
it works for me and it doesn't need 3rd party tools.

~~~
csense
If you put this on a blog, you could probably become the top Google result for
how to copy a bootable Windows partition, and make tons of money from
advertising.

The last time I was able to make head or tail of the Windows bootloader was in
XP, before they decided that plain text configuration files were too easy for
users and they needed to obfuscate the interface by using binary blobs that
you could only work with using a rather confusing, poorly documented tool.

~~~
ethbro
As a MS note, I'll just point that copy begat xcopy begat robocopy (and now
apparently Copy-Item in powershell). This sequence doesn't fill me with
Windows cli tool confidence.

------
kogir
On Windows, just use dism (formerly imagex). /capture-image the old drive, and
/apply-image the new drive. It uses volume shadow copy and can run on an
online system.

Not sure what tools were tried in the article, but using the official one from
the OS vendor seems like it should have been the first choice.

Coincidentally, I did it this weekend to upgrade my SSD, the exact situation
described in the article. Worked fine with no issues.

[https://technet.microsoft.com/en-
us/library/hh825258.aspx](https://technet.microsoft.com/en-
us/library/hh825258.aspx)

~~~
chc4
I've never heard of this before! Is it advertised anywhere? Our IT dept has
been cloning and reimaging for years and this is the first I've seen it.

~~~
kogir
If cloning multiple systems, use the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit:
[https://technet.microsoft.com/en-
us/windows/mt240567](https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/mt240567)

All of these tools have been around in some form (not necessarily fully baked)
since Windows Vista and part of the TechNet deployment documentation.

------
Mister_Snuggles
I went from a spinny disk to a larger SSD on my MacBook Pro. The process was
roughly:

1) Hook SSD up to an external adapter.

2) Plug it in.

3) Format it.

4) Use CarbonCopyCloner to clone it.

5) Shut down, swap drives, restart.

At this point I had spent a couple of hours and everything worked except for
TimeMachine backups. There was some commandline thing I found to fix that, but
that wasn't a big deal.

On a Windows machine I would have cloned the disk with dd (from a LiveCD of
some Linux), then used the Disk Management thing to expand the partition once
I had booted from the new drive.

~~~
neckro23
I did this for Windows recently (upgrading from old 128GB SSD to shiny new
512GB SSD). Process was:

1) Boot into Parted Magic

2) Copy disk using Clonezilla

3) Expand NTFS partition with gparted

4) There was no step 4.

The whole process was about as painless as possible. I kept waiting for
something to blow up on me, but nope!

~~~
CaptSpify
I used to work with Medical equipment from ~2000. All kinds of proprietary
file-system formats, funky disk-layouts, etc. Clonezilla was able to handle
90% of them with some tweaking. Great tool

------
KaiserPro
[http://gparted.org/liveusb.php](http://gparted.org/liveusb.php) gparted on a
USB stick.

It has a really nice gui.

if that fails(NTFS can be an arse), dd of=/dev/source of=/dev/destination
bs=8M(or m) (use the device not the partition, that way pain lies) which will
bit copy all the things.

then use windows to resize the partition. (but only if gparted fails.)

------
mjevans
I am honestly baffled why he had so much trouble getting a cleanly unmounted
filesystem.

From either Windows or Linux there are trivial tools for setting the 'check
this filesystem on next boot' (if it doesn't do it then and there for you)
flag. Let windows do it's check, then actually shut it down (don't suspend
it). That should have been the end of that. If /that/ never works then
something else is seriously messed up (at best some deeply integrated 'anti
virus' software) and a re-install is warranted anyway.

My typical procedure after that is to dd copy the start of the disk (up to a
few 10s of MB in to the largest partition) and also the end (if GPT), re-read
the partition table of the new disk, then use ntfsclone (linux command) on the
big partition. If I'm feeling fancy I'll also pre-copy the end of the old NTFS
partition to the same offset in the new one. AFTER booting Windows once you
can grow the partition to take on the new space.

~~~
nix0n
Windows does not unmount on a typical "Shut Down".

Here's some info on Hybrid Boot, which is on by default in Windows 8 or later:
[http://www.eightforums.com/tutorials/6320-fast-startup-
turn-...](http://www.eightforums.com/tutorials/6320-fast-startup-turn-off-
windows-8-a.html)

I have used "shutdown /s /t 0" typed into an elevated Command Prompt, but
there are other methods given in the article I linked.

------
cellularmitosis
The author doesn't seem to be very clear on why dd didn't work. Perhaps he was
trying t partition the new drive and then use dd on the individual partitions?

I'm guessing the one thing he didn't try was using dd on the raw devices
themselves, rather than the paritions. This would throw away the additional
space of the larger drive, but should serve well as a last-ditch "there's no
way this can fail" measure.

------
jerf
You know, I know the author didn't actually _name_ Tools A - E, but how much
you want to bet that there is at least a bit of overlap between Tools A-E and
the set of tools that people here have sworn you "just" have to use and have
never failed them?

~~~
kabdib
OP here.

Most of the tools I tried are mentioned on this HN thread.

My dismay was driven by the question: "This is a simple problem, how can so
many tools fail so miserably?" I still do not have an answer.

------
ars
Kind of a side topic, but I would love to see a graph of every type of storage
plotted against how long it takes to do a full read of that device.

I used to be able to copy a hard disk in an hour, these days it can take a
full day. A floppy disk takes a few minutes.

~~~
kozukumi
Anecdote but I actually did a backup of a 98% full 250GB SSD (Samsung 850 EVO)
over the weekend and it took less than 10 minutes. The read speed is ~540MB/s
though.

This was done using robocopy on a running Windows 10 machine although not of
the system drive, just a second SSD that was used for log files that was full.

------
bambax
Since no one mentioned it yet -- and for what it's worth, and YMMV and all
that -- I use Casper to clone drives on all versions of Windows, without any
problem whatsoever (used on XP, 7, 8.1 and 10).

------
jsudhams
I use this and works always..
[http://www.easyuefi.com/wintousb/](http://www.easyuefi.com/wintousb/)

------
barnaclejive
Run SpinRite on the disk first?

[https://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm](https://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm)

~~~
DanBC
Spinrite was useful in maybe 1997.

~~~
LeoPanthera
SpinRite was never useful:

[https://www.mail-archive.com/gnhlug-
discuss@mail.gnhlug.org/...](https://www.mail-archive.com/gnhlug-
discuss@mail.gnhlug.org/msg31155.html)

~~~
DanBC
I got the year wrong by a decade, but your link says

> SpinRite _may_ have had some relevance back in the days of MFM

...which is pretty much what I meant. I should have said 1987.

------
chc4
The real lesson from this is that you pretty much never _actually_ want a full
disk backup.

Why would you copy over all the operating system files and partition scheme
when you can instead do a clean install and clone over your home directory? It
in nearly all cases takes much less time and is much cleaner.

If I had to, though, the first tool I would reach for would be `dd`...which
the author never does, because it's too archaic, unlike those fancy GUI
programs that don't work?

~~~
Shog9
Because it's reinstalling all the apps that actually takes _time_.

Yes, hopefully you put all the Really Important Stuff in your home or
somewhere else where it can be trivially copied (and backed up...) - including
your favorite editor, all your configuration files, and any other tools you
can't live without.

But then you remember that you recently added a new tool to your workflow, a
_really_ shiny package, but one which also required installing approximately
1300 dependencies and for some reason a kernel driver. It took you a solid
week to get running properly, and you've long forgotten all the hoops you had
to jump through to do it.

~~~
striking
This is why I thank my lucky stars that I use a rolling release distro.
Configuration is in my home folder, and my system is no more than a list of
packages or PKGBUILDs.

~~~
kozukumi
Which is actually _very similar_ to what Microsoft are doing with Windows 10.
The OS and "apps" are all "rolling" in that sense with the list of packages
stored on some MS server. Not exactly the same as something like Arch and it
only works for store apps but it is a step in the right way I guess.

------
golergka
Time machine.

------
rdancer
Guy doesn't know how to work with Windows, tries, and fails horribly: the blog
post.

What's really sad, he never does backups, so there will be a sequel.

------
glitchc
I think the author is incompetent. Not only does Clonezilla work well, but
I've also had good success with Macrium.

A windows partition that is non-bootable but properly copied can be fixed by
booting to Windows install media (USB or CD), entering the recovery console
and running FIXBOOT and FIXMBR in sequence.

~~~
Afforess
I'm not sure what filesystem he was copying from (I'd guess NTFS from the
comment about not being shut down correctly, as I recall NTFS has that
particular flag, which is why you will see the disk-scan on some reboots), but
NTFS / Windows is a massive PITA to clone. Especially if you have a newer
motherboard and have Windows installed with UEFI. You're better off not even
trying.

