Cloning your Hard Disk (HDD, SSD, NVME, …) — Clonezilla
3 min readOct 5, 2023
All you need
- Download Clonezilla
- Goes to CloneZilla download section: https://clonezilla.org/downloads/download.php?branch=stable
- Download it as a .zip file
2. Prepare the USB Pendrive
- Create at least a 500 MB partition on your USB flash drive and format it with a FAT16/FAT32 file system.
- Extract all the contents of the zip clonezila .zip file to the FAT16/FAT32 partition on your USB flash drive. Make sure you have extracted all the directories and files, including the “.disk”.
unzip clonezilla-live-3.1.0-22-amd64.zip -d /media/usb/
3. Source disk
- Identify your source disk, the disk that will be cloned, that contains all your partitions and data files
4. Destination disk
- Identify the destionation disk, the disk that will receive the cloned data. All previous data will be wipe out from this disk during the process
5. Boot the Live USB
- Power off the PC
- Stick the USB pendrive on it
- Power on PC
- Press F12 to open the boot menu
- And select to boot with USB drive
6. Start Clonezilla
- Select Default Settings, VGA 800x600
- Select To RAM
- Select the language English
- Select the default Keyboard US
- Start Clonezilla
7. Disk to Disk clone Setup
- Select device-to-device option
- Select Beginner
- Select disk_to_local_disk
- Select the source disk (the one identified at step 3)
- Select the destination disk (the one identified at step 4) — ALL DATA WILL BE OVERWRITED AT THE DESTINATION DISK
- Select to skip the file system check
- Select choose to choose what to do at the end of the cloning process
8. Disk to Disk clone Start
- Press ENTER to continue and START the clone process
- Confirm the ask question to make sure the correct destination disk was selected, and all partitions and data on it will be overwrited!
- Confirm again that the correct destination disk was selected — you were warning!
- Sit and wait…
9. Clonning process
- Clonezilla will create a image from the source
- Clonezilla will create a partition table at the destination disk
- Clonezilla will copy which partition from source disk to the destination disk
- Clone process ends!
10. Finsih
- Clonezilla will ask you what to do: shutdown, reboot or enter comand line or rerun clonezilla (goes to step 6 again)
- Select shutdown!
11. Verify destination disk
- Unplug the USB pendrive
- Unplug the source disk (DO NOT BOOT WITH BOTH DISK AT SAME TIME — They have same UUID so the booting OS might mount the wrong file system.)
- Plug the destination disk
- Power up PC
- Press F12 to open the boot menu
- And select to boot with destination disk
- System will boot at the destionation disk, like it was the source disk!
12. Notes
- This process is usefull when you need to move your OS from an old disk to a new one;
- If you just want to save a backup, use the disk-to-image option in step 7 and it will create a backup .img image file.
More information about Clonezilla here: https://clonezilla.org/clonezilla-live-doc.php