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I'm doing a fresh install of Windows and I need to make a copy of all files in my system drive so I can restore them later.

I want to clone entire drive with dd tool (I'm going to use clonezilla). Then I'm going to install fresh copy of Windows 10 and restore selected files from cloned image.

My questions are

  1. Should I make dd clone of entire drive or all partitions separately? Clonezilla allows you to choose either and I don't know which is suitable for entire system drive encryption
  2. How do I later mount that dd clone image on another system (Windows)?
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  • There are lots of things that can go wrong. if you already have another volume that will hold the data, consider instead copying the unencrypted contents (and perhaps cherry-picking the specific files you want). its likely to save you time. whatever you do, be sure to test the contents of the copy BEFORE you overwrite the source disk.
    – Frank Thomas
    Commented Dec 27, 2017 at 0:17
  • The point is I don't have will or time to cherry pick files because: 1) copying tons of small files takes long time 2) I don't want to store them unencrypted on external storage because I will need to wipe it afterwards 3) I want to pick files I need after I have fresh system installed because I will know better what else I'm missing yet. Yes, I'm perfectly aware I need to test copy before I overwrite source. Thanks for input
    – stil
    Commented Dec 27, 2017 at 0:24
  • If you use Windows tools to image the whole drive, e.g. Macrium Reflect, you can mount the image under Windows as another drive. Imaging can be done from a USB rescue disk or from a mounted Windows partition using Volume Shadow Copy. Mount the image as writable in order to access files with VeraCrypt (this does not actually write to the image on disk, only to the copy in memory).
    – DrMoishe Pippik
    Commented Dec 27, 2017 at 17:27

1 Answer 1

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List of steps I ended up doing:

  1. Boot Kali Linux or any other live Linux distribution with guymager tool installed. Use guymager tool to acquire raw image of your system disk. It's much safer and usually faster than using dd by hand.
  2. You need to convert raw image to VHDX image to mount it on Windows. You're going to need vhdtool.exe and vhdxtool.exe.

  3. Firstly, convert raw image to VHD format.

    .\vhdtool.exe /convert G:\image-2017-12-29.dd

    Also, change its extension, because vhdtool.exe is not going to do it for you.

    Rename-Item G:\image-2017-12-29.dd G:\image-2017-12-29.vhd

  4. Convert VHD image to VHDX format.

    .\vhdxtool.exe upgrade -f G:\image-2017-12-29.vhd

  5. You now have VHDX image file that you can mount on your system and then open it with VeraCrypt.

I have even managed to boot my cloned VHD (not VHDX though) disk in VirtualBox inside the original system.

Tools you need:

vhdtool.exe

SHA-1: 0ff2994929e5a193369b3ccfdbb86551a9a416d8

vhdxtool.exe

SHA-1: 9cc4c58a9b14057d2b30107c61b6ce006b36b4eb
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