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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.

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    “By default, the partitioning has been made of the MBR type.” - By default it should have been GPT, if it’s MBR, that’s means when Windows was originally installed it was installed while Legacy Mode (CSM) was enabled.
    – Ramhound
    Commented Apr 5, 2023 at 13:03
  • Basically, I would prefer using legacy mode because, at least for me, UEFI has always be a nightmare. If I had installed in UEFI, would Windows have formatted the disk in GPT? Would then the overwritting of the C:\Windows partition by cloning have worked? Or can I prepartition the drive in GPT and then install Windows with legacy boot?
    – OuzoPower
    Commented Apr 5, 2023 at 16:34
  • MBR is incompatible with UEFI mode. If you boot an installation media while UEFI mode is enabled, the only way you can install Windows, is on a GPT disk. A MBR will not show up and give you an error message making it appear you don't have the approrpriate drivers (since no disk will be listed).
    – Ramhound
    Commented Apr 5, 2023 at 16:36
  • Thank you. I'm now facing the partition alignment issues because of the 4K sectors of my AF drive. Should I simply install Windows (hoping it would take care of the partition alignement), and then clone only the C:\Windows partitions (overwritting existing one)? Or should I create approximately the same partition structure using GParted (or else), prior to installing Windows or cloning one after each other each partition from the SSD? What about the recovery partition? Use the one of the new install or the original one? I assume some "repair" will be necessary after cloning the system. Thanks.
    – OuzoPower
    Commented Apr 5, 2023 at 18:11

1 Answer 1

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AOMEI Backupper Professional can do this cloning.

This is fully described in the article How to Clone GPT to MBR SSD (Worry-Free Tutorial).

To summarize :

  • Install AOMEI Backupper Professional Demo and run it

  • Click Disk Clone under Clone tab

  • Select the UEFI GPT disk as the source disk and click Next

  • Select the MBR SSD as the destination disk and click Next

  • At the Operation Summary page, check settings and click Start Clone

  • Select your options and click OK.

The options you may select are :

  • Copy without resizing partitions: It will not resize the partition size.
  • Add unused space to all partitions: It will reallocate the unallocated space to each partition of the target disk, appropriate for the disk size.
  • Manually adjust partition size: It allows you to extend unallocated space to any partition on the destination disk you want.

You will find more details and screenshots in the linked article.

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