As an emergency solution during a hardware repair, I would like to clone a 512GB NVMe SSD to a 1TB HDD, on a different hardware, and make Windows 10 bootable, in order to not have to reinstall/reconfigure all softwares, mail client, a.s.o.
The source SSD has the following GPT partition scheme:
/dev/sdb1 fat32 SYSTEM 250.00 MiB boot
/dev/sdb2 unknown 16.00 MiB msftres
/dev/sdb3 ntfs Windows 475.96 GiB
/dev/sdb4 unknown 726.00 MiB hidden,diag
1st attempt
I first clone the whole drive, but my attempt of boot repair failed.
2nd attempt
Then, I decided to do a fresh install of Windows 10 on the emergency hardware, and to only clone (overwrite) the Windows partition. By default, the partitioning has been made of the MBR type. Maybe should I have partitioned the drive in GPT before installing Windows. The partitioning sheme of this destination drive is:
/dev/sda1 ntfs System reserved 50.00 MiB boot
/dev/sda2 ntfs 930.95 GiB Windows (partition is oversized)
/dev/sda3 ntfs 523.00 MiB diag
unallocated
The automatic boot repair tentatives fails. So far, I have not attempted yet things like fixboot, fixmbr and rebuilding BCD.
As we see, the boot system partition of the source drive is much larger than thus of the destination drive.
After these two unsucessful tentatives, what should I do? Maybe reinstall Windows with a GPT partitioning scheme and then clone the "C:\Windows" partition again?
3rd attempt I'm know resizing the /dev/sda to around 500GB and moving it to make mor space for the system partition. Then I plan cloning the GPT partition scheme. Not sure what I should do with the boot partition. If I clone it from /dev/sdb, the situation would be close to thus of the 1st attempt.
Which are the steps that I should follow to allow a successful boot of the clone on the emergency hardware?
I have at my disposal:
- a flash drive with Windows installer, so that I can run Windows commands (diskpart and others) using the "Repair" tools
- a bootable DVD of Linux PartedMagic (with gparted and Terminal)
How to take into account the original UEFI boot and the prefered current legacy boot?
(N.B. source SSD had 512 bytes sector size. Destination HDD is 4K but AF, so supporting the 512 bytes logical sector size.)
Additional nightmare: The 512 bytes sectors of the 512GB SSD are not aligned on multiples of 4096 bytes. Almost all my 1TB 2.5'' HDD are AF. After cloning fdisk mentions partition not aligned on cylinder and with GParted there is a seek error. Gparted shows the cloned disk as unformatted.