Re: [gentoo-user] Guidance on using Gentoo to clone a Win 10 system drive

[Michael Jones]

Generally the way I've handled this situation in the past is like so (this
is written from memory, so expect gratuitous problems).

On the machine with the drive attached
mbuffer -i /dev/mydrive | xz -e -9 | mbuffer -O hostname:port

On a machine with storage space
mbuffer -I port -o /path/to/storage.xz

To make a backup.


In terms of cloning windows to another harddrive in general, as long as the
destination harddrive is large enough to fit the original drive without
issues, simply running:

dd if=/dev/original of=/dev/destination
(I prefer dcfldd, personally)

Is enough. Run gparted (the graphical version, for nice wizards) after, and
it'll fixup your partition table for you to match the new size, and you can
re-size any partitions you have to make them match as well. I do exactly
this all the time and have yet to have a problem.

As for windows 10 licensing, don't trust me on this blindly, but your
license should be tied to the hardware fingerprint of the laptop. So even
installing windows fresh on your new SSD should result in Windows
activating automatically. In fact, you might want to take this opportunity
to try that out, to get a completely fresh installation without the decade
of old cruft built up by window's lack of a package manager.

If it doesn't activate as soon as you plug in an ethernet cable, you can
just wipe your SSD and copy your old installation as discussed already.



On Mon, Jan 6, 2020 at 1:11 PM Mark Knecht <markknecht@×××××.com> wrote:

> Hi all,
>    I haven't been here in a couple of years. IT's great to see some
> familiar names posting. Cheers to all.
>
>    I have a laptop running Win 10 with no (working) DVD/CDROM. For various
> reasons I want to move from a 10 year old laptop drive to a new SSD and am
> looking for guidance on I might do that. Win 10 is properly licensed but
> through a weird channel - it was Win 7 that M$ allowed to convert to Win 10
> for free and I'm nervous that if the hard drive died I'd have to purchase a
> new license as the free conversion path likely doesn't exist anymore.
>
>    Both drives are nominally 500GB.
>
>    The older hard drive fdisk info shows:
>
> root@science:~# fdisk --list /dev/sde
> Disk /dev/sde: 465.8 GiB, 500107862016 bytes, 976773168 sectors
> Disk model: ASM1053E
> Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
> Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
> I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
> Disklabel type: dos
> Disk identifier: 0xe0c5913d
>
> Device     Boot     Start       End   Sectors   Size Id Type
> /dev/sde1              63  45062324  45062262  21.5G 1c Hidden W95 FAT32
> (LBA)
> /dev/sde2  *     45062325 288063133 243000809 115.9G  7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
> /dev/sde3       288063488 289247231   1183744   578M 27 Hidden NTFS WinRE
> /dev/sde4       289249254 976768064 687518811 327.9G fd Linux raid
> autodetect
> root@science:~#
>
> The Linux RAID autodetect is from running Gentoo at some earlier time and
> probably doesn't need to be copied. I'm not at all sure what /dev/sde3 is
> or whether it's required to make M$ happy.
>
>    The new SSD is unused and shows:
>
> root@science:~# fdisk --list /dev/sdf
> Disk /dev/sdf: 465.8 GiB, 500107862016 bytes, 976773168 sectors
> Disk model: ASM1053E
> Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
> Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
> I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
> root@science:~#
>
>    The appear to have the same sector count and overall size.
>
>    I can make a 1TB drive available in my big machine and work over USB
> (which is what I'm doing to get the info above) but I'm unclear how much of
> this can be done automatically and how much I might need to do by hand.
>
>    As long as I don't hurt the old drive I can put data on the SSD
> multiple times to get through the process in case I have trouble.
>
>    Does anyone have experience with this sort of issue and can you point
> me toward some instructions I might try?
>
> Thanks,
> Mark
>
>
>