Question Cloning A Windows 7/Linux dual Boot To SSD

michael diemer

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Feb 2, 2013
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I plan to clone a laptop HDD with Windows 7 and Zorin 15, to a new SSD. Anyone have experience doing this? Many cloning apps are windows only. I currently have Macrium , Aomei and Clonezilla. I'm pretty sure Clonezillz will do this job. I'm not aware of anything else that will.

One concern I have is that saving the image on an external drive may nuke the data on that drive. In fact, I was well into doing it when that thought suddenly seized me, and I shut the computer down. Didn't want to risk blowing away all my wife's backups! I've saved partition images before, but not two different OS's on one HDD.

Which is why I plan to do a direct HDD to SSD clone, with a new SSD, so no chance of losing anything. There are a lot of tutorials out there, but I can't find one that deals with a Windows/Linux dual-boot.

both drives will be 1TB. The laptop is a Dell Inspiron N7010, about 10 years old. The HDD is rated "caution" by Crystal Disc, which is why I want to clone it. Windows is hanging badly on it, and I haven't' been able to fix it. But with a fresh clone, I can do things like a non-destructive reinstall, system restore, etc, without worrying, since I still will have the original.

Thanks, Mike
 

USAFRet

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From within Windows, Macrium will do this. It does not care what OS might be on a different partition.

But, if the current drive is having issues, you might just be moving those issues to a different drive.
Corrupted files, and even possibly not reading at all when it hits a bad spot.
 

michael diemer

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From within Windows, Macrium will do this. It does not care what OS might be on a different partition.

But, if the current drive is having issues, you might just be moving those issues to a different drive.
Corrupted files, and even possibly not reading at all when it hits a bad spot.
That's a very good point. In fact, during a diagnostic, there were several places where it couldn't read from the disk. But I thought that once I have it on a new drive, I can just reinstall Windows 7 "non-destructively." New copy of Windows (so works well), and still have all the programs and files. If that fails, I can always do a fresh install, and migrate the files and reinstall the programs. and do a boatload of updates.
 

USAFRet

Titan
Moderator
That's a very good point. In fact, during a diagnostic, there were several places where it couldn't read from the disk. But I thought that once I have it on a new drive, I can just reinstall Windows 7 "non-destructively." New copy of Windows (so works well), and still have all the programs and files. If that fails, I can always do a fresh install, and migrate the files and reinstall the programs. and do a boatload of updates.
If it cannot read parts of the drive, cloning is a useless pursuit.
You're either copying corrupt data, or skipping parts of it completely.

Macrium and other tools have a Forensics function, which will copy every sector possible, or just skips the failed portions.
But you're leaving out parts of it.
 
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michael diemer

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Ah, I see...I was kind of afraid of that. Well in a way it's a relief. I'll just do a fresh install and use that Windows 7 convenience rollup. Chris Hoffman has a great tutorial on it. Fortunately my OS disc does have SP1.