Windows 10: Cloning a new system disk from an old (not in use) system disk...

The simplest and quickest method I've found is Clonezilla. It's free and much faster than most of the others. It's easy to use and takes about 15 minutes to create the image, and about the same amount of time to restore. I use it a couple of times a week so that I always have a completely up-to-date image of my Windows 10 system.

 

I've heard of Clonezilla now for several years in fact but never gave that one a try! It's good to know that an alternative to MR works however! I wasn't too keen on Macrium to start with and ended up buying the 2010 Acronis TI while in a local Circuit City one night before that retail chain decided to go belly up! Walmart certainly doesn't carry softwares as far as having any local retail chain other then the Staples full retail. *Rolleyes You can look over the information on the open source app at the sorceforge main site itself. Clonezilla - About

That has to be quick and small software wise to be able to fit on a cd-r since you have to boot live from it. That is one of the main limitations of course while Windows orientated programs allow you to continue working in Windows while the imaging runs in the background. Acronis takes about 34min. for a full image on the 1tb OS drives here when there are video files and recently other recording included. Once I get done with a few things on the 7 side however most of that will be gone along with the need for a few apps still only able to run on 7.

A full image however as you know yourself doesn't get time consuming anywhere near what you can run into with cloning at times. It helps being able to verify an image backup comes out intact however.

Went to grab the AMD64 alternate which covers UEFI and ended up with the same download I already had being Partition Wizard! Clonezilla download

 

My drive is also 1TB. That Clonezilla version also boots in UEFI mode. I even have a complex image that is Windows 10/Linux Mint dual boot that imaged and cloned back to the PC drive perfectly.

 

Typically the open source apps are found to be less likely to fail since they are written to the basics not being bloated up with various extras! Yet at the same time the larger Windows softwares can provide more options. So you can be in a sort of Catch 22 at times trying to decide which one or going for broke on all.

 

I know Windows 10 sticks some goofy "special" partitions out there. But, the disk I installed, and the Windows 10 system I put on it originally had NO, I repeat NO, "special" partitions. Don't know why, don't really care. It worked for 7 months perfectly, 'til I retired it and gave it to my wife. And yes, I know how disk management works, and there were absolutely no "special" partitions in there either. The only thing in there, on the SSD, as the O/S partition and a 20GB unpartitioned chunk for over provisioning.

Moot at this point since I blew the whole thing away the other day and just installed Windows 10 Home on a disk for the system. And this time there the customary couple additional partitions. Just for giggles, I'd be curious to know what would happen if you went into Partition Manager and got rid of those partitions...

Anyhow, problem solved, not well, quickly or neatly, as I would have hoped, but solved.

 

One way I avoid any extra partitions even the small System Reserved that was introduced years back with Vista is to use the other OS's drve tools at times at least for physical installs while the Windows install will always suffice for VMs. I generally see the one single primary either for the OS install or for the main volume on a storage drive. One note on that is that a small 400mb of empty drive space reserved for conversion from MBR to GPT is needed at some point for any new drive(s) being added in.

With the HP OEM primary having been a stubborn mule on the old 7 laptop I upgraded I ended up nuking the factory volumes off completely booting live from a Linux Mint Debian dvd to use GParted while live to nail the drive and then see a new primary for 10 as well as a second small backup partition created for someone who wouldn't ever need over 200gb anyways! Guess who has to set it up and run it when paying a visit no less?!

You wouldn't have to worry about getting rid of any stubborn partitions for sure when booted live since there are no system or other processes running that are keeping the drive busy! Without any OS running the only possible concern would regard any encrypted volumes while NaDa for any regular volumes being removed with ease. Once you have a fresh primary created and can even see it formatted to NTFS while booted live you then allow the 10 installer to do the rest later when booting from the 10 media you have. One thing about imaging programs like Acronis for example is the secure erase option you can nuke any drive with except the one you are booted from into Windows while the recovery disk also has that option as well for live tools as well as recovery. You have some options available to see that tended to.