Question Cloning Windows boot HDD - Various Questions

[talkingcomputer]

tldr: the programs that are supposed to do this suck and i just want a simple free way to make a bootable clone of an ntfs win7 pro 64 partition onto a new blank hdd. (anti-win7 googlebots need not reply)

i searched for information on this forum and i might have just missed it but i couldnt find exactly the information i need
(like the closest thing i can find is how to clone to an image using macrium, but i want to just clone directly from one hdd to another, and not using a program you have to pay for to get access to features that probably wont work anyway because if they did work then there would be no job for the tech support people)
a great example here:

Question - Clone Win7 OS to install in another PC

First of all I love my Win7, and never want to upgrade. But my PC's shelf life is near. I have Win7 Home Edition OEM on my existing PC, and I'd like to know if I clone it using AMOEIbackupper, can I install that on a new hard drive, on a PC that I can buy that doesn't have a hard drive, but...

forums.tomshardware.com

sounds like that should be exactly what i need right? no its just anti-win7 stuff, nothing useful, and most of the threads are something like that. yeah the hardware has to be compatible, duh, what about just making the actual backup, thats the question?

and google of course says that the only option to clone a hdd is to buy some program to do it
well i bought one and of course its nothing but weird errors that the tech support just wants to blame me for
("you must run the checkdisk, now you must scan the sectors, now you must connect to our remote assistance and download our app to your phone and blah blah" YIKES!)

after buying one program that doesnt work im not going to pay for another, i really think that there must be plenty of free ways to do this but the googlebots just want everyone to buy their advertisements

first of all if RAID drives have been a thing for like 30 years how can it possibly require special programs to make one bootable drive to have the same data as another? isn't there just some commandline thing i can do? how could there not be when the people who made DOS were so cool? surely the need to clone windows boot drives had a fix long before all these trashy googly win11y smartphone-ui-junk programs...

i read about clonezilla but they make it sound complicated, like on their website it seems to say that the destination hdd for the cloning has to be the same one clonezilla is on? so if thats right id have a clonezilla debian partition on the hdd i just want my windows stuff on. again, it's just too involved for what this should be.

 

[Lafong]

(like the closest thing i can find is how to clone to an image using macrium, but i want to just clone directly from one hdd to another,

The free edition of Macrium has 2 primary capabilities:

1; image making and restoring that image

2; cloning directly from one drive to another

Cloning does NOT require making an image at all. You don't "clone to an image". You clone to a drive and that drive is IMMEDIATELY bootable.

The 2 processes are cousins but typically used for different reasons:

Imaging; normally used to recover from a bad situation like virus, software corruption, drive failure, or an unexplained jam of some type. A pretty good "backup". The image file you make is later "restored" to another drive and it is ONLY at that point that the drive is bootable.

Cloning; normally used to move from one good working system to another, usually larger hard drive....rather than to recover from a bad situation.

BUT....imaging can also be used to move a good system to a larger drive, just like cloning. I do that myself....I could use cloning, but choose not to.

And....a cloned drive is obviously a backup in some sense. You clone good drive number 1 to good drive number 2 and then put drive 2 in a drawer and don't touch it until drive 1 fails.

Not sure where you went off the track with Macrium. It can do either clone or image. No need to use the paid version in an ordinary situation. Do you have some unusual requirement that might force you to use the paid version?

 

[talkingcomputer]

Not sure where you went off the track with Macrium. It can do either clone or image. No need to use the paid version in an ordinary situation. Do you have some unusual requirement that might force you to use the paid version?

hi thanks for the reply
i only read about macrium in the image backup thread and read its website, i havent tried using it yet

it still just seems crazy that it even requires an extra program to do this simple stuff, why cant a commandline function copy all the necessary data? surely people did this for years before any of these programs

i bought a macrium competitor program mostly because the macrium website's download pop-ups wouldn't work on my win7 pc's browser, there were no direct trial download links there i could find, the buttons and popups and such dont function with old IE.
then when i used the competitor program trial, before i bought and activated a license, cloning a boot drive that is the same one you've booted into at the time was a feature you had to pay for. i guessed most trial versions will have limits like that

is that different with macrium? would i have to boot some kind of usb recovery thing?

if you're sure macrium's trial version will clone the boot drive with its master boot record and all that stuff, i will try to get it on usb drive from my win10 pc.
it still really feels like there must be some much simpler way though, backing up boot drives isnt new

 

[Lafong]

https://www.macrium.com/reflectfree

Here's Macrium trial version. After 30 days, I think it automatically becomes the Free version.

Windows has it's own built in backup program. It is bogus and no longer in development. Avoid.

You can copy all the "data" you want, but that doesn't mean the result will be a bootable drive. It's complicated.

You need to decide what your ultimate motive is.

Move from good system drive 1 to a new drive? Or disaster recovery aka "backup".

Either cloning or imaging sorta works for both, but each has advantages depending on your specific goals.

If you use imaging, you could have a new drive up and running in perhaps 30 minutes or an hour. For instance: May 1, you make an image file and store it on a drive other than your boot drive, possibly external, could be internal. May 3 at noon, your drive has a major problem and won't boot. You boot from a previously prepared USB flash drive "recovery media" made from within Macrium. That boots you to the Macrium interface. You tell Macrium to restore that image file you made on May 1. Within an hour, your system is back up and running as it was on May 1.

If your troubled drive will still boot, you wouldn't need to use the USB flash drive. You'd boot into Windows, start Macrium from the hard drive, and tell Macrium to restore the image file from there.

You can make a new image file whenever you want. Keep as many as you like. Store them anywhere they will fit OTHER THAN on your system drive. They are big. I keep 2 and make a new one every month. Right now, I could restore an image file from early Jan 2023 or early Feb 2023. Delete the ones you don't want just like a pork chop recipe.


If you use cloning, you'd go to your drawer with the clone, remove the bad drive, and install the cloned drive. You'd be back up and running, with the system as it was at the moment you made the clone. That could be an hour earlier or a year earlier....depending on when you made the clone.

 

[TerryLaze]

how could there not be when the people who made DOS were so cool? surely the need to clone windows boot drives had a fix long before all these trashy googly win11y smartphone-ui-junk programs...

DD for windows will do that for you.
If you install lsfw you can even run the original linux version of dd.

Also everything leo fong describes can also be done with MS original windows components.

You can create a bootable windowsPE that can take an image of your system and then restore it.
https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/133132-dism-clone-deploy-using-ffu-image.html

 

[talkingcomputer]

macrium doesnt work either, same basic error (semaphore timeout and/or "cant read sector" while copying the mbr)

still reading guides for clonezilla and dd, theyre complicated so im just reading and rereading

just one question in the meantime:

this windows 7 pro hdd is MBR, not gpt, so could the errors im getting be because the target destination hdd is larger than the 2TB limit of MBR? im not going to convert mbr to gpt before i make the backup, only afterwards. looking at these easeus/macrium/whatever style clone apps i wouldnt be surprised if they cant handle something like that

 

[USAFRet]

macrium doesnt work either, same basic error (semaphore timeout and/or "cant read sector" while copying the mbr)

still reading guides for clonezilla and dd, theyre complicated so im just reading and rereading

just one question in the meantime:

this windows 7 pro hdd is MBR, not gpt, so could the errors im getting be because the target destination hdd is larger than the 2TB limit of MBR? im not going to convert mbr to gpt before i make the backup, only afterwards. looking at these easeus/macrium/whatever style clone apps i wouldnt be surprised if they cant handle something like that

If Macrium can't read the source drive ("cant read sector") then a different tool can't do it either.
This speaks to a fault on the source drive.

 

[TerryLaze]

this windows 7 pro hdd is MBR, not gpt, so could the errors im getting be because the target destination hdd is larger than the 2TB limit of MBR?

That is a partition limit not a hdd size limit.
It would clone it fine, the destination drive would just be 2Tb or however big the source drive is with the rest of the destination drive being raw/empty.

 

[SkyNetRising]

macrium doesnt work either, same basic error (semaphore timeout and/or "cant read sector" while copying the mbr)

To be able to clone, the drive has to be readable.
Diagnose health of your clone source drive. Use HDtune health, post screenshot.
(upload to imgur.com and post link)