Drive cloning in Windows 10 and 11

By Ed Tittel

Computerworld |

Cloning a PC drive comes in handy for a variety of reasons, but primarily when you want to replace one drive on a PC with another that is either bigger or faster than the original drive, if not both.

Such a cloning operation becomes critical on Windows PCs when the drive to be replaced is the boot/system drive, meaning it contains the files used to boot up the machine when it’s starting up or restarting, as well the operating system files used to run Windows itself. It’s critical because its proper outcome is a machine that boots and runs when that operation is complete, the old drive removed, and the new drive put in its place.

Disk cloning, now often called drive cloning, means creating a true and faithful copy of one computer storage device on another — in other words, copying the contents of one storage device onto another storage device. The original name comes from a time when this meant spinning hard disks. But today, with solid-state drives (SSDs) as common as hard disks (HDs), both source and target can be either an HD or an SSD. In fact, it’s often the case when a boot/system disk is being cloned that the source is an HD and the target an SSD because of the improved performance that such a changeover invariably delivers.

That said, the terms “disk cloning” and “drive cloning” are used more or less interchangeably. The older nomenclature persists in terms like “disk image,” and you may see drive cloning software refer to all storage devices as “disks,” even if they’re SSDs.

In workplace practice, drive cloning supports multiple valuable uses, including the following:

A cloning operation usually proceeds in one of two ways:

Though the second approach takes a bit longer and requires special software, it has become the preferred approach to drive cloning for a variety of reasons. First among these is that so long as the disk image is available, problems with the target drive (or the systems involved in writing to that drive) won’t prevent the cloning operation from completing (as soon as issues in writing to the target get resolved).

Thus, the overall process I’ll cover in this story is to create an image of the drive to be cloned, and then restore that image to a different drive. Though there are countless options for this task (and most good backup programs, such as Acronis, ToDo and AOMEI Backupper, can also clone drives), I recommend using one of two tools for drive cloning in Windows 10 or 11:

Starting a drive cloning operation in MiniTool Partition Wizard (MTPW) is as simple as firing up the application, choosing Copy Disk Wizard in the left-hand menu (see Figure 1 background left), selecting a source drive, and clicking Next.

Figure 1: By default, MTPW picks Disk 1 as the source. On most desktops and laptops, this should be the system/boot drive as shown here. Note that Drive C appears third from left. (Click image to enlarge it.)

Next, of course, one must click a destination drive. For this example, I used an external, USB-attached 1TB Samsung EVO M.2 SSD device I keep around for testing purposes. Figure 2 shows the Copy Disk Wizard window with Disk 2 (the target drive) selected.

Figure 2: Because there are only two drives on the test PC, Disk 2 shows up as the disk clone target.

On systems with three or more drives, you’ll have to select your target explicitly. Once you do so and click Next, a Warning window appears, as shown in Figure 3. DO NOT PROCEED unless you’re ready to lose the contents of the target drive as it currently exists.

Figure 3: Once you click Yes to proceed, the target drive’s prior contents will be destroyed.

Next, you’ll be asked to fit or resize partitions on the target disk. In most cases, that won’t be necessary. Click Next to keep going.

You may also be warned to “change BIOS mode to UEFI” — this will only be necessary on older PCs or laptops; devices from 2017 or newer are almost certain to run the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) already.

Click Finish to fully commit your drive clone from source to target. This is the point of no return; you can still click Cancel at this stage to forgo the drive changes that will otherwise occur. Once you click Finish, you’ll wind up with a perfect copy of your original source drive in the target’s place.

If both devices are the same kind (NVMe M.2 SSD, for example), you can open up the PC, remove the source device and plug in the target device, then boot your PC from that device.

Note: If you buy a license for MTPW, I recommend the Pro Ultimate license for a one-time fee of US$159. It covers as many as five PCs and includes excellent data recovery capabilities in addition to disk and partition management and repair. I’ve used the tool to good effect for a decade or more now. It pays itself off in under three years for a single PC annual subscription and covers multiple admin PCs.

Using Clonezilla Live means leaving the Windows environment to run the program. It operates within its own runtime environment, which is based on Linux and operates inside a character mode interface.

Clonezilla will let you clone one drive directly to another without writing an image in between (or it will first write an image, then copy that image to the target drive). Geekyprojects.com offers a good tutorial on how to use the software to clone a drive: It’s entitled “How to Use Clonezilla” and is worth consulting. Other good references include Richard Lloyd’s YouTube tutorial entitled “Clonezilla Disk Imaging and Cloning Utility Live USB Boot Disk Tutorial” and Clonezilla’s own step-by-step instructions entitled “Disk to disk clone.”

The process takes about 15 steps to complete and is straightforward, especially if you can follow along with one of the preceding resources on another screen. Clonezilla Live runs at least one-third (33%) faster than MTPW on the same source and target drives. I took a shortcut by taking a bootable USB drive built by the Microsoft Media Creation tool, deleting all files, and then copying the contents of the Clonezilla Live .ZIP archive onto that drive. Popped it into the target PC, rebooted, and targeted that USB for boot-up. Worked like a charm.

Here's an overview of the steps for direct drive-to-drive cloning:

Figure 4: Choose “device-device” for direct drive cloning.

The one-line command alternative is displayed at the bottom of the screen as the cloning gets underway:

/usr/sbin/ocs-onthefly -g auto -e1 auto -e2 r -j2 -sfsck -k0 -p reboot -f nvme01 -d sdb

At some point, you’ll be prompted, “Press ‘Enter’ to continue...” Do so. After additional checks, you’ll hit the point of no return and get a warning in all caps that the data is about to be destroyed. Go ahead, do it: enter y (twice). Then the actual cloning gets underway. Upon completion, you should have a replacement for the original target disk.

Good stuff!

Occasionally, on some computers that boot using UEFI, cloning boot/system drives can go awry. Such a situation will make itself immediately apparent when you try to boot from the destination disk and get a message that reads something like “Unable to boot” or “Unable to find operating system.” If this happens to you, you may need to try a different approach. Start by disabling Secure Boot (see Microsoft’s instructions for doing so in Windows 10 and in Windows 11), and try again. This will often do the trick.

Otherwise, technically savvy readers can turn to the Windows command-line boot repair utilities bootrec and bcdboot, or to third-party tools such as EasyBCD ($40), to attempt such repairs. Ultimately, the result should be a bootable, cloned boot/system disk.

This article was originally published in February 2017 and updated in July 2023.

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