I just realized I forgot to include the segment on how to address the extra unallocated space on the drive. If you clone to a larger drive you can extend your primary partition to use that space. In Disk Management, (see timecode 5:14) find the Primary Partition of your cloned drive, right click on it, select Extend Volume, In the dialog select the maximum space available click next. Now click finish and the partition will extend and the unallocated space will be no more.
@@ElevatedSystems It worked! But I had one issue, there were two partitions after the C-drive, one of them I was not able to resize. I was out of luck, except that I found something that does the trick: Partition Wizard (Free edition). It let me move these partitions after the unallocated space. After that I resized the C-drive with that some program. It was literally seconds work. Works Great now!
@@ElevatedSystems can you be a bit more specie here When I try to extend it the option is greyed out My drive has 6 partitions for some reason(sony vaio ultrabook, not sure why they do this but this is how it was from the factory) They go like this , OEM partition(260MB) ,recovery partition(1.44GB),EFI system partition(260MB),Boot page file crash dump partition(204.70GB),recovery partition(450MB),recovery partition(31.26GB) ,693.04 GB unallocated So it is in front of it just not directly So should I try and extend the 31.26GB recovery partition and then ,try and extend the 450MB partition and then try and extend the primary boot partition? I mean keep moving the unallocated space backward down the list ?
I find it interesting how people charge $25-$100 for a cloning software for their replication / cloning needs, yet there is this method. I actually use Linux a lot and did this with my grandma's HDD to an SSD, and that's when it hit me that people get away with charging so much for simple things. Anyhow thanks for the video. I did this process a lot a while but forgot how to do it and the commands so thanks for the help!!!! Hope to see more great videos!
Worked for me, thanks. I used GParted Live instead of Ubuntu, I regretted that after trying to browse while the drive was cloning. Fortunately it only took 3 hours as I had both installed internally and used SATA ports. I kept the old disk installed for general data storage as it is still working properly. This involved booting back into GParted Live and running an additional command to clean it as both drives had the same signature as they had been cloned and Windows was unhappy about it.
Thank you, this is exactly what I was looking for! Your instructions worked very well! This saved me a lot of time; reinstalling all the software would have been so much more work.
Thank you so much for this! Thankfully I had Ubuntu already install on my usb drive since I had to use Linux so much to fix things but I had no idea that you could clone drives this easily with it! Saved me from my quickly dying SSD that I had to clone to my laptop ssd which I didn't need
This worked great! *NOTE* I had UbuntuStudio and there was not Gparted intalled and I got errors trying to install it. I went to terminal and put in 'sudo lsblk'. This works well if your disks are different sizes so you can determine for sure which disks your are copying to and from. Don't fry the wrong drive lol. Great vid!
Thanks for the refresher, I've been using Ubuntu for a couple of years now as my sole operating system because of the inherent and infuriating instability of Windows 10, but my hard drive is getting old and I just got an SSHD (Hybrid drive) to bring some life back into it. I haven't used the dd command before so this is a fun new thing to learn. Going to try to dual boot again after the clone. Wish me luck!
Remember - if you're cloning something like a 2TB MBR drive to a 4TB drive... the cloned drive will be MBR and you wont' be able to easily resize the 2TB (or smaller) partition to make use of the full 4TB. In this case, it can be tricksy to convert from MBR to UEFI GPT and you might be better off booting to Ubuntu and running a copy command or some such. Just something to consider.
Just wanna say I tried two other methods from prominent TH-camrs, first requires AOMEI, which they say is free but it isn't - the 2nd uses Macrium Reflect, which cloned the drive but it wouldn't boot into windows. You method I used the exact same drives and worked no issues.
Extremely helpful video! Didn't want to use some weird freeware software, so I knew you could do it with an Ubuntu USB. Been doing this all night, need to swap the drives in the morning. Hopefully it works... Copied 240 GB in 2690 seconds (45 minutes). Hopefully this speeds the computer up massively, moving to an M.2 drive.
Great tutorial! I just wanna stress again that you have to be REALLY careful with the dd command. I recommend first entering the entire command without the sudo at the beginning, then double, triple, quadruple check that you entered everything correctly, and then add the sudo and press enter. That way nothing can happen if you accidentally hit enter.
When you don`t use the sudo cmd it wil always return the error no acces to /dev/sda, so there is no use of not using the sudo cmd directly, just check and double check.
Very good! YES! I would like a tutorial on cloning a partition of one hard drive onto a partition of an SSD. Wild card: My new SSD is an M.2 in an actual PC I'm building, but the original is the second drive in a Mac Mini which is risky to disassemble to that extent. It's a dual-boot Mac which normally boots into Linux Mint, but can boot into OSX on its original drive. I won't be using the Mac OS in the target PC. Each OS on the Mini is on its own drive, and there's a separate boot partition on the Linux drive, with a second partition for data. All data is backed up onto an external drive, which is not bootable. The source drive, #2 on the Mini, is bigger than the 512gB SSD, but the boot/OS partition is smaller. The ultimate plan is to make a 2nd partition on the 512gB SSD for Windows 7 (smaller and cleaner than Win 10) and have the system be dual-boot. I have a video on how to do that part. Thanks!
You can clone a single partition pretty much the same way as a whole drive. It's done by adding the partition number after the drive designation like this /dev/sdc1 where the 1 is the partition you want to clone.
@@ElevatedSystems: Thanks. I think the hurdle is cloning from one computer's HDD to another's SSD. without removing the Linux drive from the Mac Mini. That's like brain surgery, with similar consequences. But, I may just have to bite the bullet and do that. Once it's in the new box, the rest should be trivial. I may even leave it there as a 2nd HDD. It's "only" 700gB.
Hi CJ - just came across this and it is excellent! However, it was from 2019. Did you ever make a how to video showing exactly on how to clone from a larger, spinning HD to a smaller SSD? Thanks again!!
I didn't because going with the Linux method is a little more complicated then I think the average user could follow, but if you need to do that I'd recommend checking out Clonezilla.
Just a reminder you don't gotta worry about bit locker with a home version of windows 10/11 only the pro version has it (edit)This worked amazing only took 4.5 hours to copy
I've liked this video.But still a few remarks: 1. It's better to add conv=sync,noerror to dd command. That will overcome possible badblocks of source HDD. 2. This method sometimes may not work. In fact, I waste a lot of time, trying to revive Windows booting after dd -clone. dd-clonning works ~90% of cases. 3. Maybe higher "bs=" would work faster.
Hello elevateed systems, loved your video i have one simple question tough, in the video i saw that the Windows partition you were cloning had a fat extention in the MBR I looked at mine and that has the whole disk in NTFS does that make a difference of some kind in Gparted ? Looking forward to your answer Greetings Dirk.
You deserve more likes and subs Sir. Excellent video. Saved me alot of time. But what if I just want to clone drive C partition only instead of whole drive? I don't need drive D or E.
Great video! Quick question before tyring it out myself: The original HDD was GPT right? If so why did you initialize the new SSD to MBR and not GPT ? Or is it irrelevant because dd does a full copy and the new drive will have a GPT partition table after the clone is done?
Ok, im answering my own question by quoting Elevated Systems answer on an older question found in the comments. I didn't search enough through the comments before asking 😅 " If you are cloning a GPT drive it dosen't matter. The drive will clone as GPT regardless of how the target drive was formatted. It's the opposite that can be problematic in some cases (MBR source to GPT target). The method I outlined should work for any situation without introducing another step of checking the source drive type. "
Hi, really an excellent explanatory video of yours. Now I have a question, I purchased a new laptop with Windows 10 installed and I plan to install Linux besides it. But before I want to clone the harddrive with the Windows installation into a sd card, I have to adjust the partition because my sd card is just 32GB but that is enough. My question is if it is absolutely necessary to format my sd card in ext3 before starting the cloning process? greetings
No, just leave the partition unallocated and it will format the same as your Windows partition during the cloning process, however I'm not sure if the SD Card will actually be bootable using this process. I've never tried it.
1St, thanks to your video it is great. But... Please: I already have Ubuntu installed (/dev/sda8) side by side with windows 10 (/dev/sda3) I also have some data in (/dev/sda4) I would like to upgrade from my 250 G to a 1000G (/dev/sdb) any suggestion? Thanks
You are better off writing "sudo sfdisk -l" in the terminal. It shows clearly if there is 0 (zero) or O (letter o) in the disk name. In Gparted they look too much alike.
Will add to the chorus of cheers for already furthering my understanding of linux massively! - Only 'one' (multi-part) question; would this command (correctly) work: sudo dd if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/sda3 - that is to say; can I copy a whole disk onto a pre-existing partition of a separate disk? -*or* am I better off just moving one partition 'onto' another? i.e. sudo dd if=/dev/sdb2 of=/dev/sda3 -*or* perhaps should I just use gparted for the copying too? xD To clarify sdb is ~400/500gb full/big while sda is 1.2/4 TB full/big Either way cheers for the great video, super helpful! Cheers!!
You can copy an entire disk into a single partition IF the entire disk is a single partition. If it is multiple partitions then you will need to copy the individual partition. The copied partition will be the same size as the imaged partition so if you want it to be larger you can just extend it into the unallocated space of the new drive.
You'll need to move anything you can off the original drive and shrink the partition (in Windows Disk Management) to 1Tb or less, then clone just that partition, not the whole drive. This is done by adding the partition number after the drive designation like this /dev/sdc1 where the 1 is the partition.
@@ElevatedSystems I don't think it's that simple. If you only clone one partition, you will be missing the boot information, as well as any other partitions, like the UEFI partition (if the system is not MBR), and the Recovery partition. I would use Minitool Partition Wizard (get version 11 if you can, as the newer "free" versions are more limited). With that, you can resize and copy partitions. You'll still need to reinstall the boot info. I use the Macrium Reflect recovery disc (USB stick) as it has a nice automatic option for fixing this.
You need to use: bs=number count=number "bs-number*1024^2*count-number/1024^3" should be the total of shrunk partition(s). I used this command to clone 174 GB from a 1TB disk to a smaller 500GB ssd drive: dd if=/dev/sda of=mount/win-clone-lenovo.img bs=64M count=2784 status=progress Partition size on sda drive was 172GB. Copying t a image first is a lot faster, but you do need an extra drive for that. Also used gdisk and fdisk to edit the partition on the new drive to match the 500GB drive. First save the partition with fdisk. Restoring with gdisk and than putting the saved info back with fdisk.
Thanks you for your video! I'd suggest using MultibootUSB or YUMI, and or Ventoy... which are all FREE, and a whole lot better to make a bootable USB... since... NOT only will they, make a bootable USB, but they can make "persistence" by saving work, apps, or links, or files folders etc on the USB / Stick, so you can USE it as a BACKUP System with personal choices of apps and settings! So not ONLY do ya'll end up with a cloning USB, but also a MULTIBOOT Operating Systems, and as MANY as you can put on a 64GB to 128GB (
Great video except for one tiny gripe.......... when you did the accelerated installation of hardware you had the volume of the "music" about 5-7 times the level of your narration. OUCH.
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thank you i followed your way step by step but at the end dd commant give error after 5 hrs. i think deactivating of bitlocker c: not good for me. because i have win 10 home. i search and it has no bitlocker . but checking it as Check Bitlocker status command: manage-bde -status it gives Disk volumes that can be protected with BitLocker Drive Encryption: Volume C: [Windows] [OS Volume] im not sure my win 10 has bitlocker or not. if not what are the reasons of dd stops cloning procedure. thank you
Not working. My cloned harddrive showed up empty in windows diskmgmt as raw and told me that i should format it. In linux is shows at least that there are two of the four original paritions.
I came here looking for a guide to back up and copy a dual OS ( Ubu/Win) to a SSD. Not really what this video offered. Also, I feel like elevated spent way too much time on the easy parts like going through the mundane process of writing the partition down. And went to quickly thru the complex parts, I mean trying to clone/format using the linux terminal especially for a new user is a recipe for disaster. I suggest viewers to find another guide.
I tried doing it on another PC that has Ubuntu installed so I skipped everything before GPARTED and terminal. Made my target drive GPT partition table - cause that's the same as the original drive - then made it 4 different partitions (3 nfts and an ext4). Half for storage and the other for OS which were not recognized. PC will try to load indefinitely. Also: on terminal I did include the identification number of the target partition, still bigger size than original drive.
I retried and it seems to be working - I'm actually using the clone right now - I think I shouldn't have tried adding the partition number and shouldn't have partitioned on GParted before making that dd thing on terminal.
so my laptop has an ssd (256GB) and an external HDD (1TB) so I was wondering if I could just clone my ssd to my HDD and then swap out a bigger SSD (1tb) and clone it back? does it work with the dd command this way on a new partition created on my HDD?
Brother I am actually triple booting my laptop how does disk cloning works if I wanna switch to an SSD ( my operating systems are Ubuntu , windows and Kali .plz respond brother.
Yes, this will work for any drive on any type of system, as long as the hardware is compatible with Linux (I've never actually ran into incompatibility problems using Ubuntu). As I said in the video you can clone a larger HHD to a smaller SSD using the linux dd command as long as there is not more data on the drive then space on the SSD. It involves shrinking the partition on the original drive and then cloning the partitions, not the entire drive. I don't have a video covering this on my short term schedule, but I may be able to add it early in the new year.
I was frantically looking for reference on this topic... What baffles me is this: you chose MBR partitioning table and used the dd utility to duplicate a GPT-partitioned drive (presumably because it has a separate EFI partition). Isn't that problematic?
If you are cloning a GPT drive it dosen't matter. The drive will clone as GPT regardless of how the target drive was formatted. It's the opposite that can be problematic in some cases (MBR source to GPT target). The method I outlined should work for any situation without introducing another step of checking the source drive type.
@@ElevatedSystems Oh, thanks for the explanation! I got my new SSD running smoothly! My laptop (Lenovo Z51-70) has a weird issue with the optical drive which I replaced with the SSD. The port has lower priority and is never used as a boot-up port. I had to use it to clone Windows onto the SSD. I have to open up the laptop each time the drives switch position. I wanted to use the old drive as data partition, but somehow the old disk is never detected on that port. This was an unexpectedly cumbersome experience due to weird motherboard design by Lenovo. But it did help me find the custom assembler in me. 🙂
Followed the guide to copy a windows partition that's locked onto an external drive. Now I have a locked windows partition and an overwritten drive. Next time mention that any existing data will be overwritten on the output drive.
Unfortunately this wasn't a guide on how to clone a partition, it was a guide on how to clone an entire hard drive, which by definition overwrites the output drive with a bit by bit copy of the original drive. In order to clone individual partitions you would need to add additional commands to the if and of arguments to target the input and output partitions.
Hi, first of all, congratulations, you have perfect explanations ! I switched from sata2 drive 160gb, containing a dual boot system ubuntu + windows 10. Under linux, my sda drive said disk is ok but 3 bad sectors... I was able to clone it as you show here, but after switching it on the same machine, i was unable to make windows work properly. It got BOSD or automatically reboot, or completely freezed after 1min...
Dual boot disk cloning can be problematic due to disk swap space of both OS' or master boot record sector assignment inconsistencies. Your best bet is to ensure you repair your original drive ensuring data is not occupying bad sectors and use Clonezilla for the clone as it tends to work better for dual boot drives.
@@ElevatedSystems I saw that i got a swap created in a logical drive containing 1 sub-partition that has a strange character displayed around "Partition type". I just removed it and created a primary one with exactly same size and changed UUID from /etc/fstab and the error went away. As I mainly use linux, i'll try later to fix the windows bug if possible.
Oh My! The dd transfer rate, here, is 5.8MB/s. It's goning to take about 26h to complete the cloning process of a 500GB HD to a 480GB SSD. I thought that letting it work overnight would be far enough time. Both the HD source and the SSD targer are connected to the SATA ports on the MoBo. What have I done wrong?
use bs this way: dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb status=progress bs=65536 2067922944 bytes (2,1 GB, 1,9 GiB) copied, 58 s, 35,7 MB/s I stopped it .. but it goes about 35 MB/s on my old computer
Will this method work going from the W10 install on a HDD to a drive on the m.2? It's currently giving me missing hardware on boot which probably means it's trying to talk to the older drive still. Also I would prefer to skip one data partition on the older drive if I could but I'll work around it if I need to copy the whole drive itself. Edit: Oh I should mention I was using standalone GParted and copy/pasting.
my source disk actually has 5 partitions. can I clone all at once? or do I need to pre-partition the new disk, and clone each separately? I likely have more than I need, but at the very least the average user will have "c: the OS" and "d: OS recovery disk" I also have a data partition, and a parturition strictly for video files. thanks for the advice.
@@ElevatedSystems thanks, I figured out what I did wrong. when they came up in the diskmanager, only the first partion was highlighted, which was "sdb1", so thats what I wrote down, rarther than "sdb". followup question though. after completion, the PC booted up fine, and appeared to be ok. however, after it sast for a while, it reported a disk error, and wanted to reboot to fix it. it wasnt able to recover. I'm trying the the dupe again, but only the win partion this time. A) originally the PC was so bad I had to power cycle it to shut it down. B)should I have done a quick reboot immediately after the first startup? any other thoughts? PS, I don't think it should matter, but I'm using fedora, becuase I already had it.
Hello I need help, I have 1TB HDD with windows and Linux OS as dual boot and I bought an 1TB ssd , how to clone the dual boot HDD with both systems to the new ssd? Does your method works for my situation ? please answer if you can thank you!
Dual boot cloning can be tricky, this method will work but you will probably need a windows recovery media to "repair" the Windows MBR partition on the new SSD.
You can try HDD Raw Copy tool. It will skip unreadable sectors and make an exact copy of your drive. You will need another blank drive of the same size (or larger).
I purchased an ssd recently and would like to shift my windows 11 which is installed on my HDD to my SSD would this be possible to do as a Windows Insider .
Dear, I have a problem with my hard drive. It contains Linux file system, now I want to use it in my windows 10 laptop. I used ext2.fsd Now this is asking for format. But I have important information, I can't format it. What can I do? Would you please help me on this issue!?
Unfortunately I don't think the ext2fsd project has been supported or updated in a few years and therfore probably is no longer compatible with more current linux distros. If you have room you can always dual boot your Windows laptop with a linux distro and access the info from the drive that way.
Open a command Prompt as administrator (see timecode 6:36 ) and enter the following command: manage-bde -protectors c: -get replace C: with the letter of the drive that is encrypted if it is different.
if i have windows and ubuntu both in my laptop how to upgrade hdd to ssd without losing any of them? and also i have some files in c and some are in d drive what about? will they still remain there ?
Can I clone a 500 GB hdd to a 480 GB ssd using this method? I’m using Ubuntu only. The hdd is using 8.82 MB for EFI System Partition and 22 GB. 1.02 MB unallocated. It’s a semi-new laptop so there isn’t much on the computer. Thank you.
You can but it requires more steps, the easiest way to do it is with Clonezilla. It's also a free app you can run directly from an USB drive and is easy to use.
@@ElevatedSystems I see on Clonzilla's website it states that "the destination partition must be equal or larger than the source one." Would I still be able to clone my hardrive using this software? I am not too familiar with the terminology so I want to make sure. Thank you for your help!
@@ktykeh You can do it in expert mode but, although I've never used it myself, I know a lot of people also use AOMEI to clone a larger to a smaller drive.
I have yet to find a Linux tool that can easily clone a larger drive to a smaller one. That's too bad, as most people will have larger HD, and will be buying smaller SSD (due to cost). So it's a common problem. The current process seems to be: 1. Shrink the large original HD partition. 2. Copy this partition to the SSD. 3. Copy over any other system partitions (using GParted, or whatever). 4. Restore the boot information (Rescatux...or...?)
Great tutorial! I just wanna stress again that you have to be REALLY careful with the dd command. I recommend first entering the entire command without the sudo at the beginning, then double, triple, quadruple check that you entered everything correctly, and then add the sudo and press enter. That way nothing can happen if you accidentally hit enter.
I have a 500gb nvme ssd with a windows 10 partition and ubuntu partition. Am I able to clone to a 1tb ssd with windows 10 and ubuntu together even though they both use different filesystems?
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I just realized I forgot to include the segment on how to address the extra unallocated space on the drive. If you clone to a larger drive you can extend your primary partition to use that space. In Disk Management, (see timecode 5:14) find the Primary Partition of your cloned drive, right click on it, select Extend Volume, In the dialog select the maximum space available click next. Now click finish and the partition will extend and the unallocated space will be no more.
Can this be done with the primary partition in use (C:/)?
@@mrt8096 Yes, you just need to make sure the volume your extending is in front of the unallocated space.
@@ElevatedSystems Great. It will work then thnx.
@@ElevatedSystems It worked! But I had one issue, there were two partitions after the C-drive, one of them I was not able to resize. I was out of luck, except that I found something that does the trick: Partition Wizard (Free edition). It let me move these partitions after the unallocated space. After that I resized the C-drive with that some program. It was literally seconds work. Works Great now!
@@ElevatedSystems can you be a bit more specie here
When I try to extend it the option is greyed out
My drive has 6 partitions for some reason(sony vaio ultrabook, not sure why they do this but this is how it was from the factory)
They go like this , OEM partition(260MB) ,recovery partition(1.44GB),EFI system partition(260MB),Boot page file crash dump partition(204.70GB),recovery partition(450MB),recovery partition(31.26GB) ,693.04 GB unallocated
So it is in front of it just not directly
So should I try and extend the 31.26GB recovery partition and then ,try and extend the 450MB partition and then try and extend the primary boot partition?
I mean keep moving the unallocated space backward down the list ?
I find it interesting how people charge $25-$100 for a cloning software for their replication / cloning needs, yet there is this method. I actually use Linux a lot and did this with my grandma's HDD to an SSD, and that's when it hit me that people get away with charging so much for simple things. Anyhow thanks for the video. I did this process a lot a while but forgot how to do it and the commands so thanks for the help!!!! Hope to see more great videos!
Worked for me, thanks. I used GParted Live instead of Ubuntu, I regretted that after trying to browse while the drive was cloning. Fortunately it only took 3 hours as I had both installed internally and used SATA ports. I kept the old disk installed for general data storage as it is still working properly. This involved booting back into GParted Live and running an additional command to clean it as both drives had the same signature as they had been cloned and Windows was unhappy about it.
Thank you, this is exactly what I was looking for! Your instructions worked very well! This saved me a lot of time; reinstalling all the software would have been so much more work.
Worked like a charm, so far (larger drive, not extended, yet). Great video! Thank you
Thank you so much for this! Thankfully I had Ubuntu already install on my usb drive since I had to use Linux so much to fix things but I had no idea that you could clone drives this easily with it!
Saved me from my quickly dying SSD that I had to clone to my laptop ssd which I didn't need
This worked great!
*NOTE*
I had UbuntuStudio and there was not Gparted intalled and I got errors trying to install it. I went to terminal and put in 'sudo lsblk'. This works well if your disks are different sizes so you can determine for sure which disks your are copying to and from. Don't fry the wrong drive lol. Great vid!
I think it is recommendable to add a parameter like bs=4M to the dd command. This should speed up the copying process.
Very true, you can also add a sync parameter but I wanted to avoid any parameters that could possibly produce an error for the novice linux users.
Cloned my Samsung 860 EVO to my 970 EVO M.2 instructions were well explained
Thanks for the refresher, I've been using Ubuntu for a couple of years now as my sole operating system because of the inherent and infuriating instability of Windows 10, but my hard drive is getting old and I just got an SSHD (Hybrid drive) to bring some life back into it. I haven't used the dd command before so this is a fun new thing to learn. Going to try to dual boot again after the clone. Wish me luck!
Good luck.
Elevated Systems all good now 👍🏽
Remember - if you're cloning something like a 2TB MBR drive to a 4TB drive... the cloned drive will be MBR and you wont' be able to easily resize the 2TB (or smaller) partition to make use of the full 4TB. In this case, it can be tricksy to convert from MBR to UEFI GPT and you might be better off booting to Ubuntu and running a copy command or some such. Just something to consider.
Good point. If I keep the partition small (250gb), and create s different one (for dual boot purposes), this should not negatively affect me right?
While running ubuntu, everything was perfect
fantastic video! you've earned a subscriber for sure!
9.25 to 12.25 was what indeed thanks so much
Gonna have to save this for later. It may come in handy.
Just wanna say I tried two other methods from prominent TH-camrs, first requires AOMEI, which they say is free but it isn't - the 2nd uses Macrium Reflect, which cloned the drive but it wouldn't boot into windows. You method I used the exact same drives and worked no issues.
Extremely helpful video! Didn't want to use some weird freeware software, so I knew you could do it with an Ubuntu USB. Been doing this all night, need to swap the drives in the morning. Hopefully it works... Copied 240 GB in 2690 seconds (45 minutes). Hopefully this speeds the computer up massively, moving to an M.2 drive.
Yeah it totally worked. Thanks. Had to expand it in Ubuntu and run chkdsk like a thousand times, which I sort of recommend, but now all is well!
Great tutorial! I just wanna stress again that you have to be REALLY careful with the dd command. I recommend first entering the entire command without the sudo at the beginning, then double, triple, quadruple check that you entered everything correctly, and then add the sudo and press enter. That way nothing can happen if you accidentally hit enter.
When you don`t use the sudo cmd it wil always return the error no acces to /dev/sda, so there is no use of not using the sudo cmd directly, just check and double check.
Very good!
YES! I would like a tutorial on cloning a partition of one hard drive onto a partition of an SSD. Wild card: My new SSD is an M.2 in an actual PC I'm building, but the original is the second drive in a Mac Mini which is risky to disassemble to that extent. It's a dual-boot Mac which normally boots into Linux Mint, but can boot into OSX on its original drive. I won't be using the Mac OS in the target PC.
Each OS on the Mini is on its own drive, and there's a separate boot partition on the Linux drive, with a second partition for data. All data is backed up onto an external drive, which is not bootable.
The source drive, #2 on the Mini, is bigger than the 512gB SSD, but the boot/OS partition is smaller.
The ultimate plan is to make a 2nd partition on the 512gB SSD for Windows 7 (smaller and cleaner than Win 10) and have the system be dual-boot. I have a video on how to do that part.
Thanks!
You can clone a single partition pretty much the same way as a whole drive. It's done by adding the partition number after the drive designation like this /dev/sdc1 where the 1 is the partition you want to clone.
@@ElevatedSystems: Thanks. I think the hurdle is cloning from one computer's HDD to another's SSD. without removing the Linux drive from the Mac Mini. That's like brain surgery, with similar consequences. But, I may just have to bite the bullet and do that. Once it's in the new box, the rest should be trivial. I may even leave it there as a 2nd HDD. It's "only" 700gB.
Hi CJ - just came across this and it is excellent! However, it was from 2019. Did you ever make a how to video showing exactly on how to clone from a larger, spinning HD to a smaller SSD? Thanks again!!
I didn't because going with the Linux method is a little more complicated then I think the average user could follow, but if you need to do that I'd recommend checking out Clonezilla.
Thanks buddy! I just keep upgrading the Thinkpad T430, thing never dies! #Ubuntu
The tutorial video is what I am looking for. It's so great. Thanks.
Just a reminder you don't gotta worry about bit locker with a home version of windows 10/11 only the pro version has it
(edit)This worked amazing only took 4.5 hours to copy
"only" 😂
This is exactly what I was looking for, thank you! Subbed right away. Cheers!
Super awesome video! It doesnt get much simpler than that. Thanks.
Glad it was helpful!
status=progress !!! thank you so much
Thanks for everything you do
You are welcome.
awesome video . thanks for the simple instructions to do rite . A plus video = subscribed since great video
Awesome, thank you!
I've liked this video.But still a few remarks:
1. It's better to add conv=sync,noerror to dd command. That will overcome possible badblocks of source HDD.
2. This method sometimes may not work. In fact, I waste a lot of time, trying to revive Windows booting after dd -clone. dd-clonning works ~90% of cases.
3. Maybe higher "bs=" would work faster.
@daniel d3fldd has the switches to control parameters like your question. A more advanced version of dd.
Hello elevateed systems, loved your video i have one simple question tough, in the video i saw that the Windows partition you were cloning had a fat extention in the MBR I looked at mine and that has the whole disk in NTFS does that make a difference of some kind in Gparted ?
Looking forward to your answer Greetings Dirk.
Delete the question i found it already.
I'm sorry but there's no way a barrista could make latte foam that beautiful. Latte art deep fake alert.
is there a video for cloning to smaller SSD?
I definitely need it
Thank you for this awesome video! Just one question: Why MBR and not GPT? The partition style for my original drive is GPT.
Its just the bootable USB drive that is formatted as an MBR partition. This doesn't affect the cloning process.
@@ElevatedSystems Thanks but I was talking about here 5:25 when you were preparing the SSD
@@MatthewNOBryan Ok. you can initialize it as a GPT if you want.
Thank you very much!
very good content and i like the way you explained it greetings from germany
Hey, thanks!
You deserve more likes and subs Sir. Excellent video. Saved me alot of time. But what if I just want to clone drive C partition only instead of whole drive? I don't need drive D or E.
Great video! Quick question before tyring it out myself: The original HDD was GPT right? If so why did you initialize the new SSD to MBR and not GPT ? Or is it irrelevant because dd does a full copy and the new drive will have a GPT partition table after the clone is done?
Ok, im answering my own question by quoting Elevated Systems answer on an older question found in the comments. I didn't search enough through the comments before asking 😅
" If you are cloning a GPT drive it dosen't matter. The drive will clone as GPT regardless of how the target drive was formatted. It's the opposite that can be problematic in some cases (MBR source to GPT target). The method I outlined should work for any situation without introducing another step of checking the source drive type. "
Hi, really an excellent explanatory video of yours. Now I have a question, I purchased a new laptop with Windows 10 installed and I plan to install Linux besides it. But before I want to clone the harddrive with the Windows installation into a sd card, I have to adjust the partition because my sd card is just 32GB but that is enough. My question is if it is absolutely necessary to format my sd card in ext3 before starting the cloning process? greetings
No, just leave the partition unallocated and it will format the same as your Windows partition during the cloning process, however I'm not sure if the SD Card will actually be bootable using this process. I've never tried it.
Awesome tutorial; thanks much!
Great video, mate! Thank you.
Awesome job! Thank you!
Gracias, mi amigo Nico va a probar
Why are you using dd in terminal when most Windows users are used to a GUI? Why not just use gparted and clone sda to sdb?
Options.
1St, thanks to your video it is great.
But... Please: I already have Ubuntu installed (/dev/sda8) side by side with windows 10 (/dev/sda3) I also have some data in (/dev/sda4) I would like to upgrade from my 250 G to a 1000G (/dev/sdb) any suggestion? Thanks
You are better off writing "sudo sfdisk -l" in the terminal. It shows clearly if there is 0 (zero) or O (letter o) in the disk name. In Gparted they look too much alike.
Thanks a lot. I’ve tried couple programs, didn’t help. Only under Linux.
MBR is only 2TB. Can i use GPT instead to make use of the full size?
Will add to the chorus of cheers for already furthering my understanding of linux massively!
- Only 'one' (multi-part) question; would this command (correctly) work:
sudo dd if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/sda3
- that is to say; can I copy a whole disk onto a pre-existing partition of a separate disk?
-*or* am I better off just moving one partition 'onto' another? i.e.
sudo dd if=/dev/sdb2 of=/dev/sda3
-*or* perhaps should I just use gparted for the copying too?
xD
To clarify sdb is ~400/500gb full/big while sda is 1.2/4 TB full/big
Either way cheers for the great video, super helpful!
Cheers!!
You can copy an entire disk into a single partition IF the entire disk is a single partition. If it is multiple partitions then you will need to copy the individual partition. The copied partition will be the same size as the imaged partition so if you want it to be larger you can just extend it into the unallocated space of the new drive.
I need this from big to small. 2TB to 1TB please any help?
You'll need to move anything you can off the original drive and shrink the partition (in Windows Disk Management) to 1Tb or less, then clone just that partition, not the whole drive. This is done by adding the partition number after the drive designation like this /dev/sdc1 where the 1 is the partition.
@@ElevatedSystems I don't think it's that simple. If you only clone one partition, you will be missing the boot information, as well as any other partitions, like the UEFI partition (if the system is not MBR), and the Recovery partition. I would use Minitool Partition Wizard (get version 11 if you can, as the newer "free" versions are more limited). With that, you can resize and copy partitions. You'll still need to reinstall the boot info. I use the Macrium Reflect recovery disc (USB stick) as it has a nice automatic option for fixing this.
You need to use:
bs=number count=number
"bs-number*1024^2*count-number/1024^3" should be the total of shrunk partition(s).
I used this command to clone 174 GB from a 1TB disk to a smaller 500GB ssd drive:
dd if=/dev/sda of=mount/win-clone-lenovo.img bs=64M count=2784 status=progress
Partition size on sda drive was 172GB.
Copying t a image first is a lot faster, but you do need an extra drive for that.
Also used gdisk and fdisk to edit the partition on the new drive to match the 500GB drive.
First save the partition with fdisk. Restoring with gdisk and than putting the saved info back with fdisk.
very helpfull but do u no how to save a copy of my entire hdd or ssd??? its important really
Thanks you for your video!
I'd suggest using MultibootUSB or YUMI, and or Ventoy... which are all FREE, and a whole lot better to make a bootable USB... since... NOT only will they, make a bootable USB, but they can make "persistence" by saving work, apps, or links, or files folders etc on the USB / Stick, so you can USE it as a BACKUP System with personal choices of apps and settings!
So not ONLY do ya'll end up with a cloning USB, but also a MULTIBOOT Operating Systems, and as MANY as you can put on a 64GB to 128GB (
I'm dualbooting Windows 10 and Ubuntu. Would this work with cloning both OS to the SSD
Great video except for one tiny gripe.......... when you did the accelerated installation of hardware you had the volume of the "music" about 5-7 times the level of your narration. OUCH.
thank you i followed your way step by step but at the end dd commant give error after 5 hrs.
i think deactivating of bitlocker c: not good for me.
because i have win 10 home. i search and it has no bitlocker .
but checking it as Check Bitlocker status command:
manage-bde -status
it gives
Disk volumes that can be protected with
BitLocker Drive Encryption:
Volume C: [Windows]
[OS Volume]
im not sure my win 10 has bitlocker or not. if not what are the reasons of dd stops cloning procedure. thank you
Not working. My cloned harddrive showed up empty in windows diskmgmt as raw and told me that i should format it. In linux is shows at least that there are two of the four original paritions.
you can simply use gparted copy all partitions from the old drive and paste them to the new drive, then that is it, no need to use the dd command
That works good for GPT partitions but doesn't always correctly copy the MBR partition on an NTFS drive leading to boot failure.
Very good! Thak's.
Didn’t work for me. I don’t know if it was because of the MBR or GPT thing. Guess this might be time I go with Linux or Mac.
Good Stuff! Thanks!
Thanks a lot for this tip
I came here looking for a guide to back up and copy a dual OS ( Ubu/Win) to a SSD. Not really what this video offered. Also, I feel like elevated spent way too much time on the easy parts like going through the mundane process of writing the partition down. And went to quickly thru the complex parts, I mean trying to clone/format using the linux terminal especially for a new user is a recipe for disaster. I suggest viewers to find another guide.
I tried doing it on another PC that has Ubuntu installed so I skipped everything before GPARTED and terminal.
Made my target drive GPT partition table - cause that's the same as the original drive - then made it 4 different partitions (3 nfts and an ext4). Half for storage and the other for OS which were not recognized. PC will try to load indefinitely.
Also: on terminal I did include the identification number of the target partition, still bigger size than original drive.
I retried and it seems to be working - I'm actually using the clone right now - I think I shouldn't have tried adding the partition number and shouldn't have partitioned on GParted before making that dd thing on terminal.
If I have Linux on an M.2 drive can I use it to dd the HDD on the same machine to ssd ? Thanks
so my laptop has an ssd (256GB) and an external HDD (1TB) so I was wondering if I could just clone my ssd to my HDD and then swap out a bigger SSD (1tb) and clone it back? does it work with the dd command this way on a new partition created on my HDD?
Brother I am actually triple booting my laptop how does disk cloning works if I wanna switch to an SSD ( my operating systems are Ubuntu , windows and Kali .plz respond brother.
what if you have windows in a partition ?
1TB HDD with 3 partitions windows in a partition that is 250GB need to move it to a SSD !
Awesome help! But is it the same with a desktop computer? And can you make a video on how to copy from a larger HDD to a smaller SSD?
Yes, this will work for any drive on any type of system, as long as the hardware is compatible with Linux (I've never actually ran into incompatibility problems using Ubuntu). As I said in the video you can clone a larger HHD to a smaller SSD using the linux dd command as long as there is not more data on the drive then space on the SSD. It involves shrinking the partition on the original drive and then cloning the partitions, not the entire drive. I don't have a video covering this on my short term schedule, but I may be able to add it early in the new year.
@@ElevatedSystems what happend to me was that my SSD of 256GB said it had 1TB after the transfer. Now my windows does not work on any of the drives.
@@emlz Are you sure you didn't get your image file and output files confused?
I was frantically looking for reference on this topic...
What baffles me is this: you chose MBR partitioning table and used the dd utility to duplicate a GPT-partitioned drive (presumably because it has a separate EFI partition). Isn't that problematic?
If you are cloning a GPT drive it dosen't matter. The drive will clone as GPT regardless of how the target drive was formatted. It's the opposite that can be problematic in some cases (MBR source to GPT target). The method I outlined should work for any situation without introducing another step of checking the source drive type.
@@ElevatedSystems
Oh, thanks for the explanation!
I got my new SSD running smoothly!
My laptop (Lenovo Z51-70) has a weird issue with the optical drive which I replaced with the SSD. The port has lower priority and is never used as a boot-up port. I had to use it to clone Windows onto the SSD.
I have to open up the laptop each time the drives switch position. I wanted to use the old drive as data partition, but somehow the old disk is never detected on that port.
This was an unexpectedly cumbersome experience due to weird motherboard design by Lenovo. But it did help me find the custom assembler in me.
🙂
Followed the guide to copy a windows partition that's locked onto an external drive. Now I have a locked windows partition and an overwritten drive. Next time mention that any existing data will be overwritten on the output drive.
Unfortunately this wasn't a guide on how to clone a partition, it was a guide on how to clone an entire hard drive, which by definition overwrites the output drive with a bit by bit copy of the original drive. In order to clone individual partitions you would need to add additional commands to the if and of arguments to target the input and output partitions.
Hi, first of all, congratulations, you have perfect explanations ! I switched from sata2 drive 160gb, containing a dual boot system ubuntu + windows 10. Under linux, my sda drive said disk is ok but 3 bad sectors...
I was able to clone it as you show here, but after switching it on the same machine, i was unable to make windows work properly. It got BOSD or automatically reboot, or completely freezed after 1min...
Dual boot disk cloning can be problematic due to disk swap space of both OS' or master boot record sector assignment inconsistencies. Your best bet is to ensure you repair your original drive ensuring data is not occupying bad sectors and use Clonezilla for the clone as it tends to work better for dual boot drives.
@@ElevatedSystems I saw that i got a swap created in a logical drive containing 1 sub-partition that has a strange character displayed around "Partition type". I just removed it and created a primary one with exactly same size and changed UUID from /etc/fstab and the error went away. As I mainly use linux, i'll try later to fix the windows bug if possible.
one of the easiest fixes to speed up a slow laptop is to replace the stupidly slow windows os
Excellent video
Glad you liked it
Oh My!
The dd transfer rate, here, is 5.8MB/s.
It's goning to take about 26h to complete the cloning process of a 500GB HD to a 480GB SSD.
I thought that letting it work overnight would be far enough time.
Both the HD source and the SSD targer are connected to the SATA ports on the MoBo.
What have I done wrong?
You may have done everything right, old, failing HHD's can be that slow especially when reading large amounts of data.
use bs this way:
dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb status=progress bs=65536
2067922944 bytes (2,1 GB, 1,9 GiB) copied, 58 s, 35,7 MB/s
I stopped it .. but it goes about 35 MB/s on my old computer
Will this method work going from the W10 install on a HDD to a drive on the m.2? It's currently giving me missing hardware on boot which probably means it's trying to talk to the older drive still.
Also I would prefer to skip one data partition on the older drive if I could but I'll work around it if I need to copy the whole drive itself.
Edit: Oh I should mention I was using standalone GParted and copy/pasting.
It should work just fine, just make sure you set the proper boot drive in BIOS.
Would it work for windows 7?
I want to clone my win10 ssd to an larger hdd. Can I proceed with the same command?
Yes, then you will just need to extend the partition on the larger drive.
my source disk actually has 5 partitions. can I clone all at once? or do I need to pre-partition the new disk, and clone each separately? I likely have more than I need, but at the very least the average user will have "c: the OS" and "d: OS recovery disk" I also have a data partition, and a parturition strictly for video files. thanks for the advice.
Should clone all 5 just fine.
@@ElevatedSystems thanks, I figured out what I did wrong. when they came up in the diskmanager, only the first partion was highlighted, which was "sdb1", so thats what I wrote down, rarther than "sdb". followup question though. after completion, the PC booted up fine, and appeared to be ok. however, after it sast for a while, it reported a disk error, and wanted to reboot to fix it. it wasnt able to recover. I'm trying the the dupe again, but only the win partion this time. A) originally the PC was so bad I had to power cycle it to shut it down. B)should I have done a quick reboot immediately after the first startup? any other thoughts? PS, I don't think it should matter, but I'm using fedora, becuase I already had it.
@@Gadget098u765 if there were any disk errors on the original disk the process will clone those errors. It doesn't fix errors in the process.
Great Video.
Hello I need help, I have 1TB HDD with windows and Linux OS as dual boot and I bought an 1TB ssd , how to clone the dual boot HDD with both systems to the new ssd? Does your method works for my situation ? please answer if you can thank you!
Dual boot cloning can be tricky, this method will work but you will probably need a windows recovery media to "repair" the Windows MBR partition on the new SSD.
Thank you
thank you. got er done
That's funny, I don't care who ya are.
Elevated Systems thats what she said lol 🤘thanks again man
maaan you rock!
What about a maybe corrupted hard drive? Can I recover my data from there with copying my files?
No, if you can't access the drive that probably won't work, but there are companies that specialize in data recovery.
You can append conv=noerror and whilst that won't recover faulty sectors, it will skip them and transfer what is readable.
You can try HDD Raw Copy tool. It will skip unreadable sectors and make an exact copy of your drive. You will need another blank drive of the same size (or larger).
What if I want to back up my carefully optimized windows system to a .tgz file?
So I can always put it back if windows starts being slow again
I use Acronis True Image to backup my OS.
I purchased an ssd recently and would like to shift my windows 11 which is installed on my HDD to my SSD would this be possible to do as a Windows Insider .
Yes, cloning is a bit for bit copy, dosent matter what the data is.
@@ElevatedSystems alright thank you sir . Your channel is appreciated a lot here in india.
Hi, I have a ssd of 512GB and want to clone the stuff from my 1 TB HDD, which is already dual booted... Could you help me with that? Thanks in advance
Best way I've found to clone a dual boot drive is with Clonezilla.
Dear, I have a problem with my hard drive. It contains Linux file system, now I want to use it in my windows 10 laptop. I used ext2.fsd
Now this is asking for format. But I have important information, I can't format it. What can I do? Would you please help me on this issue!?
Unfortunately I don't think the ext2fsd project has been supported or updated in a few years and therfore probably is no longer compatible with more current linux distros. If you have room you can always dual boot your Windows laptop with a linux distro and access the info from the drive that way.
@@ElevatedSystems thank you
How do you find your bitlocker key, it it on your computer somewhere?
Open a command Prompt as administrator (see timecode 6:36 ) and enter the following command: manage-bde -protectors c: -get
replace C: with the letter of the drive that is encrypted if it is different.
if i have windows and ubuntu both in my laptop how to upgrade hdd to ssd without losing any of them? and also i have some files in c and some are in d drive what about? will they still remain there ?
Dual boot drives can be tricky to clone sometimes however I've had pretty good luck using Clonezilla.
just install linux to speed it up,that would speed it up even more,unless the software you use owns you,this shouldn't be an issue
Can I clone a 500 GB hdd to a 480 GB ssd using this method? I’m using Ubuntu only. The hdd is using 8.82 MB for EFI System Partition and 22 GB. 1.02 MB unallocated. It’s a semi-new laptop so there isn’t much on the computer. Thank you.
You can but it requires more steps, the easiest way to do it is with Clonezilla. It's also a free app you can run directly from an USB drive and is easy to use.
@@ElevatedSystems I see on Clonzilla's website it states that "the destination partition must be equal or larger than the source one." Would I still be able to clone my hardrive using this software? I am not too familiar with the terminology so I want to make sure. Thank you for your help!
@@ktykeh You can do it in expert mode but, although I've never used it myself, I know a lot of people also use AOMEI to clone a larger to a smaller drive.
@@ElevatedSystems Thank you so much!
add 'bs=32768' as one more argument to dd command. Doing this, the copy will go 5 or more times faster ...
only works going to same or larger drive not going to a smaller disk
it can a work going to a smaller drive, it's just a bit more complicated and requires shrinking, and possibly moving partitions.
I have yet to find a Linux tool that can easily clone a larger drive to a smaller one. That's too bad, as most people will have larger HD, and will be buying smaller SSD (due to cost). So it's a common problem. The current process seems to be:
1. Shrink the large original HD partition.
2. Copy this partition to the SSD.
3. Copy over any other system partitions (using GParted, or whatever).
4. Restore the boot information (Rescatux...or...?)
Thanks! What about the unallocated space? How to resize?
I explained that in the first pinned comment.
mechanical hard drives are not stupidly slow!
In a raid array, no. In a laptop as a boot drive, yes.
dd very long time
Can i do this with linux and windows 10 dual boot drive?
Great tutorial! I just wanna stress again that you have to be REALLY careful with the dd command. I recommend first entering the entire command without the sudo at the beginning, then double, triple, quadruple check that you entered everything correctly, and then add the sudo and press enter. That way nothing can happen if you accidentally hit enter.
The famous dd, "disk destroyer" 😂
I have a 500gb nvme ssd with a windows 10 partition and ubuntu partition. Am I able to clone to a 1tb ssd with windows 10 and ubuntu together even though they both use different filesystems?