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Comment by glitchc | Hacker News Reader

I think the author is incompetent. Not only does Clonezilla work well, but I've also had good success with Macrium.

A windows partition that is non-bootable but properly copied can be fixed by booting to Windows install media (USB or CD), entering the recovery console and running FIXBOOT and FIXMBR in sequence.

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I'm not sure what filesystem he was copying from (I'd guess NTFS from the comment about not being shut down correctly, as I recall NTFS has that particular flag, which is why you will see the disk-scan on some reboots), but NTFS / Windows is a massive PITA to clone. Especially if you have a newer motherboard and have Windows installed with UEFI. You're better off not even trying.

I've cloned hundreds of drives while I worked for two years in the IT department at a large university (30k+ students), and I never had an issue with using Clonezilla or Norton Ghost (which is no longer even supported, but still works perfectly).

If you're moving to a larger drive, just do the above process and then use Gparted to resize the partition. As many warnings as it throws about trashing copies of data, I've never actually seen it happen.

Author was a competent computer programmer when you were still in your diapers. What works for you may not work for him due to a variety of circumstances.

Note that if your windows was installed to boot via UEFI, and your bios is set for BIOS boot (maybe you changed it to run a copy tool and forgot), fixboot and/or fixmbr will instead give you cryptic errors instead of fixing things.

I've even used the latter technique to remove Linux from a dual-boot drive without affecting the Windows partition. Blow the distro, recovery, fix the boot record, boot into Windows, resize the partition. And this is on an SSD that was originally cloned from the spinning HDD that came with the laptop.

Macrium works great. Hassle free, Clonezilla is a bit on the techie side. And on the Mac, Carbon Copy Cloner works great as well.

Two comments on that article mention they did something like that while using Windows CD repair option to make it boot.

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