Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

April 8, 2021

Moving a Windows install to another drive on the same computer shouldn’t be this hard

Filed under: Computer Software,Linux/Unix Related,My Thoughts,Tech Related — Suramya @ 11:27 PM

I recently bought a new SSD drive for my Laptop because even after upgrading everything else (except the CPU) the system was still slow and looking at the process use I could see that it was waiting for disk read/write for the most part and that was causing the slowness. Once I got the new drive, I had to move the existing OS installs from the old disk to the new one. I have three operating systems (OS) on the disk: Windows, Debian and Kali. I need the windows OS for my classes (my proctored exams have to be taken on a windows machine) and others are for my tinkering and general use computing. The disk layout on the old drive was as follows:

root@Wyrm:~# fdisk -l
Disk /dev/sda: 931.51 GiB, 1000204886016 bytes, 1953525168 sectors
Disk model: ST1000LM024 HN-M
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x0f04ad34

Device     Boot     Start       End   Sectors   Size Id Type
/dev/sda1  *         2048   1126399   1124352   549M  7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda2         1126400 102402047 101275648  48.3G  7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda3       102402048 135956479  33554432    16G 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda4       135956480 468862127 332905648 158.7G  5 Extended
/dev/sda5       135958528 175017985  39059458  18.6G 83 Linux
/dev/sda6       175022080 237936641  62914562    30G 83 Linux
/dev/sda7       237940736 468862127 230921392   675G 83 Linux

I partitioned the new disk as a copy of the old drive, except for the data partition which was smaller as the disk was smaller. I used dd to clone each partition on to the corresponding new partition using the following command: (where sdb was the new drive).

dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/dev/sdb1 bs=2k

Once I copied the partitions over, all I had to do was refresh the GRUB boot loader config using the following command:

update-grub

After the config was updated, I was able to boot into Linux from both my Debian and Kali partitions on the new drive. However, that didn’t work for Windows. It gave be a screen-full of random characters like what you see when you try to open a binary file in a text editor and refused to boot. Thankfully I had not deleted the old windows partition so I was able to try a few more things, but *nothing* worked. Windows would just refuse to boot from the new drive. The only solution I found that could have potentially worked was a Paid software that supposedly allows you to clone your windows install on new disks/computers. Since I didn’t want to spend money on something I should have been able to do for free, I didn’t try it.

In the end after wasting a lot of time on this, I was tired of trying various things so just decided to reinstall windows on the new drive. It wasn’t a major loss because I didn’t have much data on Windows but I still dislike the fact that I had to do so just to put in a new drive. Imagine the hoops I would have had to jump if I wanted to move to a new computer. Actually I don’t have to imagine, I did jump thorough them when I moved my install from my old laptop to this one.

My linux install on the laptop is an exact clone of my desktop install. I used dd to create an image of my Linux install on the desktop and then wrote the image on the laptop. It worked perfectly fine at the first try. All I had to change was the hostname so that my DHCP server didn’t have a nervous breakdown but other than that everything worked without a single problem. Even the graphics drivers auto adjusted on the new machine. Imagine if we could do the same thing for a Windows install.

– Suramya

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