How to Clone a Bootable Drive (Clonezilla)

today I'll be showing you how to clone a bootable Drive in other words a drive that has your operating system and all your programs and data on it so first of all before we get into the video what is Drive cloning well basically it involves taking the data on OneDrive and making an exact copy of it on another like essentially you're making a bit for bit copy of the data on a drive to another drive and in the case of a bootable drive like you know one that has your operating system and all your programs and data on it everything will be exactly identical to what it was on the source Drive meaning that your whole OS installation is there all your programs and data are there and all your settings and configuration are left exactly the way it was on the source drive that is at least in theory in practice however you can't just use any Drive cloning utility to do this because after the cloning process in the case of a bootable drive you need to make the target Drive bootable after you've finished copying all the data to it because for some reason this doesn't happen automatically and that's why in this video I'm going to be using a bootable utility called Clonezilla which will not only copy each partition bit for bit but also make the target Drive bootable when it's done now I'm going to be demonstrating this in a virtual machine with a virtual drive that has Windows on it but the behavior and everything will be the same as if it were on a physical machine and the reason why I'm using a Windows bootable drive to demonstrate this is because windows is pretty cumbersome to clone just because of the way its bootloader works but without further Ado let's get right into the video alright so the first thing you got to do is download Clonezilla to do that just go to [Music] clonezilla.org and then click this download link here and by the way I'll have this page linked in the description there's a few downloads here but I would recommend the alternative stable which is the latest stable version based on Ubuntu for CPU architecture the only one under alternative stable is AMD 64 which I'm assuming that that's what you want but anyway file type I would personally do a zip since all you have to do for that is just unzip it to a USB drive which should be a blank FAT32 formatted USB drive and select repository I would do auto and then just click download and then it'll bring you here where it'll begin downloading now I've already got this downloaded and I've got it loaded in my VM which currently has an installation of Windows 11 on it on a 64 gig Virtual Drive now before I boot into Clonezilla I just want to show you this is 64 gigs and we are currently using 19.6 gigs but anyway now we are good to boot into Clonezilla so what you do for that once you've got that zip file unzipped to a blank USB drive all you have to do is reboot the system and hit your boot menu key which may be Escape F2 F12 delete or maybe even f8 depending on your computer and you'll hit it at the post screen which is the very first thing you see when you boot up your computer before your operating system starts to load but anyway once you're there you're gonna select your USB flash drive which contains your Clonezilla and then we can boot to Clonezilla live which is what's already pre-selected for us all right and then we're going to start Clonezilla since I'm assuming you're cloning from a physical drive to a physical Drive we're gonna clone from device to device and then if your target drives capacity is greater than or equal to the capacity of your Source Drive you're going to want to go with beginner mode and then you're going to select the disk to local disk and then here we're going to select our source Drive which in our case is my 64 gig Virtual Drive and then my target is my 128 gig Virtual Drive now make sure you don't mix up your Source in your target otherwise you'll cause data loss also make sure that your target drive has nothing on it that you need because it will be erased and then for now we can skip checking slash repairing the source file system and then I would suggest using the partition table from The Source disk and then you can choose to reboot shutdown or enter a command line prompt after this is done I'm gonna select choose for now just for demonstration purposes so that way I can show you what it looks like when it's done but anyway now you can press enter to continue and now it'll show us the drive that's being formatted which is our Target drive now make absolutely sure that this is your target drive and then hit Y then hit enter and then it'll ask you again make absolutely sure that this is your target drive not your Source otherwise you will lose data but anyway if you're sure hit Y then hit enter and then it'll go start the drive cloning process so now this will take a while so speed this up all right now it looks like our clone finish so we can press enter to continue so if your target Drive is equal to the capacity of your Source Drive you're done you can just power off unplug your Source drive and you should be able to boot into the target drive just fine now if your target drive's capacity was greater than the capacity of your Source drive then there's a little bit of extra work that we got to do to make it so that way you can use the full capacity of the target Drive so what you're going to do is pop back over to your web browser and then we're going to go get a program called G parted from G parted.org and then you're going to click download and by the way I'll have this page linked in the description and then under G parted Live CD you're going to go with the top one which is the G parted live amd64 dot ISO and then once you've got that you're gonna flash it to another USB drive or you could even do the one you used for Clonezilla and the instructions on how to do so are in another video which I'll link up in the card but anyway once you've got G parted flashed to a flash drive You're Gonna Go boot from that flash drive and then we're gonna boot into G parted live which is the pre-selected option and then we're gonna get it to not touch the key map and then select which language we prefer I'm gonna go with us English which is default so I can just hit enter and we're just gonna go with the defaults here and then it'll boot us into the desktop and automatically launch G parted so now I've already went ahead and disconnected my source virtual drive from this virtual machine so it's just the target drive that we've just cloned to that we're dealing with now I'm doing this with the Windows installation if you're doing with this with Linux this will look a little bit different but basically what we want to do is expand this big partition with our data on it to fill up this unallocated space on our Target drive but before we can do that there's this small partition in the way so we've got to move it out of the way by selecting it then clicking resize slash move and then basically just drag this all the way to the other side then click resize slash move then click ok now that we've got this out of the way it will create a small piece of an allocated space after that don't worry about that but anyway now we can come to our main partition with all our data on it and then resize slash move that and then basically drag this slider so that way it fills up this entire space then click resize slash move okay so now it looks like this mostly fills up our Target Drive except for this two megabyte of unallocated space which G part it just does that automatically we can just ignore that so we can click this check mark and apply our operations so now again this will take a while so I'll speed this up okay so now if you're doing this on a Windows Drive there's something else you've got to do that I actually forgot about before you can actually expand this partition we're gonna have to use The Check Disk Utility from within windows so what we've got to do is reboot into windows and then what we've got to do is go into our start menu and then find the terminal or command prompt and then right click on it and then click run as administrator and then when user account control prompts you you're going to click yes okay and then on newer versions of Windows you're gonna have to click this down arrow and then select command prompt to get a command prompt and then once you're in there you can just do check disk and then find your drive letter which you can find in File Explorer under this PC and then come back and type that here for most of you that's probably going to be C and then after that just type forward slash capital F and then hit enter and then it'll ask you would you like to schedule this volume to be checked the next time this system restarts you're gonna hit y for yes then hit enter and now just to reboot the system when Windows reboots it'll start the check disk so now this will take a little while so I'll speed this up all right and then once the check disk finishes it'll boot us back into Windows now we should be good to resize our partition in G parted so we're gonna reboot and boot up G parted again so once we're back in G parted we're going to come to our main partition with our data on it and then try resizing it again don't forget to click this check mark and then apply to apply our operations and then this time it completed successfully so now we are done all right now if I come back into my File Explorer under this PC from within windows you can see that now we have 128 gigs of space on this Virtual Drive all right so now if you're wanting to clone from a larger drive to a smaller drive it's a little bit more complicated but what you have to do is shrink your main partition so that way it'll fit on your smaller drive so what I've got to do is shrink my main partition down to a 32 gig one and I'll err on the side of leaving a little bit of Headroom so that way I don't have any nasty surprises when I try to clone this and Clonezilla and then any partitions that are after your main partition you're gonna move back so that way your entire partition table will fit on the target drive if you know what I mean and by the way if you have multiple partitions that you're storing data on you can size them how you want according to your needs just only thing you've got to keep in mind is that if you're using up more data on your Source drive then what your target Drive can hold then obviously you won't be able to shrink your partitions to fit on the target Drive which means that you won't be able to clone to that drive but anyway once we're done here we gotta click this check mark and apply our operations okay looks like we got to do a quick check disk all right so now that my check disk is done let's try shrinking the partition now all right and it looks like our operations have successfully completed yes they have so now we can go reboot into Clonezilla all right and this is basically similar to what I did for the smaller drive to the larger Drive we're gonna start Clonezilla do device to device except here we can't go with beginner mode since Clonezilla doesn't actually natively support cloning from a larger drive to a smaller Drive we actually have to choose expert mode and we're going to choose disk to local disk and then I'm going to choose my 64 gig Virtual Drive as my source drive and my 32 gig Virtual Drive as my target drive all right and then here we have to come down to dash icds which is skip checking destination disk size before creating partition table we're going to hit the space bar to check that and then tab over and hit OK to select that and then we can skip checking slash repairing the source file system and just use the partition table from The Source disk and then you can select whatever you want here press enter to continue and then make absolutely sure that it's showing your target drive here in my case it is so I'm going to hit Y then enter and then check again that this is your target drive that's being erased and again you might want to make sure that nothing's on that Target drive that you need because it will be erased but I am going to hit Y then hit enter to actually start the Clone okay it looks like we have to do another check disk before we can actually clone this basically anytime you see an error like this you gotta check this one of the joys of using Windows I will go do that real quick all right seems to be working fine now so let's Let It Go do its thing all right so it looks like our clone is done but before we can call it a day we have to go back into G parted and expand that partition on our source drive again all right and as you can see if I come into my File Explorer under this PC again within my Windows installation you can see that now I only have 32 gigs on this Virtual Drive that I just cloned to and that's how you take a bootable drive and clone it to another drive and have the target Drive bootable so thanks for watching I know it's kind of a complicated process especially if you're doing it with Windows also if you're cloning a Windows installation from one computer to another you've also got to install drivers and possibly reactivate windows on the target computer but if you liked this video and found it was helpful hit the like button share it with your friends subscribe to the channel and leave a comment

Channel: Drew Howden Tech

Views: 19,299

Keywords: Clonezilla, Clone Windows

Id: C1ILmeCGLYs

Length: 15min 31sec (931 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 21 2023