dd cloning a Win10 HDD to SSD

[Greg Kettmann]

I used Acronis True Image. It's free but only works if one of the drives is Western Digital.  It worked great for my brother as well. 

I believe I've also used EaseUS, further in the past. Even  further back I think I used Partition Magic (to clone a boot drive) but I don't think that's free anymore. 

I've cloned boot drives (mostly Windows, I usually rebuild Linux machines) quite a few times and have had excellent luck with the utilities.  They're flexible with (larger) drive or partition sizes. I've not had multiple other partitions to contend with but copying them shouldn't be difficult.  It's the MBR that is the challenge and having all the boot pointers pointing to the right locations. 

Good luck.  It's well worth it.  On an old machine the boot time was reduced by a factor of ten. Your mileage may vary but I've done this at least 6 times and never been disappointed.  Now I always make my boot drive is an SSD. 

Greg

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On Mar 23, 2021, 7:33 AM, at 7:33 AM, Bruce Labitt <bdlabitt at gmail.com> wrote:
>I'd be grateful to learn what worked.  No need to waste my time more
>than
>necessary.
>
>On Tue, Mar 23, 2021, 8:30 AM Greg Kettmann <greg at kettmann.com> wrote:
>
>> I don't know if dd works. I've done this several times using freely
>> available utilities.  In one case I tried and it failed.  I simply
>used a
>> different utility and it worked.  I was impressed with the results,
>> particularly with dramatically improved boot times.
>>
>> Sorry to be vague. You were asking about dd.  If you're interested in
>> which utility(s) I used just let me know.  I should have records. 
>The last
>> time was a year ago.
>>
>> Greg
>>
>> Get TypeApp for Android <http://www.typeapp.com/r?b=16417>
>> On Mar 22, 2021, at 10:19 PM, Bruce Labitt <bdlabitt at gmail.com>
>wrote:
>>>
>>> Have this excruciatingly slow Win10 HDD I'd like to clone to SSD.
>>> Reading about how to do this leads me to dd as a way to clone the
>disk.
>>> The disks are close in size.  According to lsblk, the HDD sdb is
>931.5GB,
>>> and the SSD sdf is 931.5GB.
>>>
>>> sdb has 5 partitions on it.
>>> 1) EFI                              500MiB
>>> 2) MS reserved partition  128MiB
>>> 3) OS "basic data" partition 918.07GiB
>>> 4) WINRETOOLS             852MiB
>>> 5) Image                           11.56GiB
>>>
>>> sdf has stuff on it, which I presume will be wiped out by dd.
>>>
>>> Since the sizes are "equal", can I just # dd if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/sdf
>>> bs=1M status=progress and be done with it?  Is there anything else
>that I'd
>>> need to do to get it to boot?
>>>
>>> ------------------------------
>>>
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>>> http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
>>>
>>>
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