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I found out my hard drive is slowly dying. It's certainly still usable, but I need to copy the operating system to another hard drive, which I don't know how to do.

I would like to try to avoid using Clonezilla if at all possible. Everyone I've talked to about it all say the same thing: it's a pain in the butt to try to get it to work, and isn't very user-friendly.

Just some important information: my current HDD has 600 GB, with 300 GB of that space taken, and is running Windows 10. My new HDD I'll be using has 2TB.

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  • +1 for Acronis. $50 to buy outright but pretty simple to use.
    – Anaksunaman
    Commented Oct 3, 2019 at 0:30
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    FWIW, Clonezilla is extremely easy to use, it just has a ton of options.
    – Michael Frank
    Commented Oct 3, 2019 at 0:32

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It would probably be a good idea to use a Linux live CD and use the dd command. It can image your entire hard drive bit-for-bit on another drive, albeit it can take time. You need a blank USB to boot Linux from to proceed.

I'll assume you're using an Ubuntu LiveCD. Once you boot up the LiveCD, select Try Ubuntu. Go to GParted and find which disk is your hard drive. It'll usually be something like /dev/sdX with a number in place of the X. Do not use the number after the X as that denotes a partition rather than a disk. Once you find the letters for your hard drive, then open up a terminal.

The next command actually images your drive. Use it with great care because a mistake can destroy whatever data you have on the drive. Execute the command below: it'll take a super long time. 

sudo dd if=/dev/sdX of=/dev/sdY bs=4K status=progress

Replace X with the letter for your dying hard drive and replace Y with the letter for your other blank hard drive that you want to image the dying one to. After this completes, you'll have an imaged hard drive.

Consult dd(1) for more on how to use dd.

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  • I actually already have a Kali Linux Live on my flash drive, but I just have one question: how will I unpack the image onto my new hard drive?
    – Ethan Waldeck
    Commented Oct 3, 2019 at 13:21
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    dd does the job for you; it copies everything bit by bit, and yeah you can definitely use the Kali Live USB
    – user962725
    Commented Oct 3, 2019 at 13:29
  • Ohhh, okay, I get it now. I thought it would just store the image file onto the flash drive. Alright, I'll try this when I get home later today.
    – Ethan Waldeck
    Commented Oct 3, 2019 at 13:32
  • Sorry, it did not work. However, there's a possibility that I did something wrong. When experimenting with the dd command, I found that it only copies partitions, not entire drives. My HDD has 3 partitions, so I don't know if I copied the partitions correctly. When I looked at the new files on the new HDD, it looked like a standard Windows 10 system. However, when I powered the computer up again, the new HDD was not bootable.
    – Ethan Waldeck
    Commented Oct 11, 2019 at 12:39
  • Did you use something like /dev/sdb2 or /dev/sdb? The number after denotes a partition; in order to copy the whole disk, you have to use /dev/sdb and you absolutely have to make sure that your disk that you're copying to is bigger than or exactly the same size as the one you're copying from.
    – user962725
    Commented Oct 11, 2019 at 13:59

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