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Question Disk Cloning question

S

samsinger

Member
Subject disk is a Samsung 970 Evo 500GB M.2 NVMe SSD. It's formatted MBR and has two partitions - System Reserved 499MB and the rest is C drive..
I'd like to clone or image it to another temporary home, like a spinner, then copy it back to another Samsung 970 Evo 500GB M.2 NVMe SSD that's formatted GPT.
How to do this? Which software would be best?
TX.
 
Why not skip the spinner and just clone it and then convert to gpt? Once cloned it's a simple one line command in windows to switch toe gpt. Then you have to change your uefi to gpt as well on reboot
 
I've used Samsung Disk Migration plenty of times on boot drives, it works most of the time (you'll know it soon enough if it doesn't, ie. the machine won't boot off the cloned disk). I suspect that it sometimes doesn't clone the recovery partition at the end of the drive along with the rest of the data (which doesn't cause the booting issue, but may be problematic later).

I've also used EaseUS Todo Backup Free plenty of times, which also works most of the time 🙂

There's an MSKB article with instructions for how to recreate the recovery partition if need be.

Am I correct in thinking that you intend for the destination drive to be wiped before it has the clone data copied to it? That's what I would expect in a cloning procedure; I've never even thought about trying to merge the two lots of data on a boot drive because I don't think that's a realistic expectation.
 
Actually, my requirement is a little more complex. The C system drive holds W7. I plan to shrink its partition and create another partition, around 125GB, in which I'll install W10 and have a dual boot system. This allows me to keep my W7 system and experiment with W10.
But because the SSD M2 is MBR, it won't allow a W10 install.
Sure, there are complex ways to change this, but it seems to me the simplest solution (that I can handle) is the one I described in my first post. But I'm not sure what would the best software to do the job.
PS: I've tried Samsung Disk Migration before. IHMO, it's useless.
 
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Win10 will install and boot MBR-style absolutely fine; I can think of at least one customer with a pre-UEFI system I built and is using Win10. TBH a few of my early UEFI systems are set to MBR because I carried on using my same old routine to install Windows until I changed over to USB install media.

I wonder if your problem is your win10 setup media. The media has to be configured to install MBR, GPT or both. Rufus gives you the option if you download the Windows ISO from Microsoft.

Let me see if I understand the nature of the problem correctly:

You have a Win7 install on a NVMe SSD already which you want to keep.
You want to dual-boot Win7 and Win10 on the same SSD.

You have a spare NVMe SSD.
I assume the reason why you're asking about cloning the original install onto the second SSD is because you don't want to risk losing the original install at all; simply doing a quick data backup of your personal data isn't enough.

Hopefully this is all correct. The partition tables should not matter at all since I'm 99% certain you can install Win7 GPT-style (I inadvertently did it on my old Haswell system, then there was a Windows update that came along that forced me to disable secure boot to continue working), or Win10 MBR-style provided you have the correct setup media.

Resizing the Win7 main partition should be simple, I believe Windows Disk Management can do it, if not then I've used gparted recently when I've been faffing around re-doing recovery partitions lately.

One other maybe relevant factor is (according to google) that NVMe SSDs apparently need a second boot ROM to boot MBR-style, I personally have not experienced this.
 
mikeymicek: Thanks for your comments. You may be right about the W10 install balking due to the setup of the installation media. I most often use Rufus, but in this case I used Ventoy. It's on a 32GB Apacer USB3. It hadn't occurred to me that I could select the installation to be either MBR or GPT. Duh 🙂 I'll set up a fresh Rufus install on another USB3, using the same W10 iso file that's on the Ventoy and see what options are offered by Rufus.
 
samsinger said:
mikeymicek: Thanks for your comments. You may be right about the W10 install balking due to the setup of the installation media. I most often use Rufus, but in this case I used Ventoy. It's on a 32GB Apacer USB3. It hadn't occurred to me that I could select the installation to be either MBR or GPT. Duh 🙂 I'll set up a fresh Rufus install on another USB3, using the same W10 iso file that's on the Ventoy and see what options are offered by Rufus.
Click to expand...
If you haven't used rufus in a while, it now asks you if you want efi/mbr after you select to do the procedure.
 
TheELF: Thanks, I'll grab the latest version and try it.
EDIT: Ooops. Rufus latest version is 4.5 but last version that works with W7 is 3.22. I guess I could have prepped the USB in a W10 pc using 4.5 but I thought maybe it then might not work in installing the W10 iso in my W7 machine. So I'll try it first with 3.22. BTW, the option for MBR or GPT is there in 3.22. I selected MBR.
 
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Heads up: Nope, no joy. Rufus worked OK and I copied the Win10 iso there in MBR mode, but the problem is that the target drive's three partitions - System.Reserved, C and the new partition - are all MBR and W10 will only install to GPT.
Apparently you can't change only one partition to GPT, the entire disk has to be GPT.
Or am I missing something?
 
samsinger said:
Heads up: Nope, no joy. Rufus worked OK and I copied the Win10 iso there in MBR mode, but the problem is that the target drive's three partitions - System.Reserved, C and the new partition - are all MBR and W10 will only install to GPT.
Apparently you can't change only one partition to GPT, the entire disk has to be GPT.
Or am I missing something?
Click to expand...

I'm almost completely certain that the entire disk has to be one partitioning layout.

TBH I haven't tried to dual-boot onto the same disk in recent memory (last time for me was Win98 + NT4 I think, maybe Win98+2k). Are you manually creating a partition then telling Win10 to install onto it, or did you just point it at unpartitioned space and pressed Enter?

Win10 certainly likes to create multiple partitions, but I don't know if it has to. With MBR partitioning you're limited to 4 primary partitions IIRC. One can work around the 4 partition limit by creating IIRC a 'secondary' partition at which point logical partitions can be created inside that, but I bet that Win10 wants to be able to boot from at least the main boot partition and the recovery partition.

Looks like someone agrees with me:
askubuntu.com

Cannot install ubuntu alongside windows 10 on an MBR Disk

I've been trying to install Ubuntu alongside windows for 2 days now I'm new to Linux and all the videos I've watched are long and tedious and they all assume you have a GPT disk. Here's the problem...
askubuntu.com askubuntu.com

askubuntu said:
Windows 10 normally uses 3 of the 4 primary partitions of MBR leaving 1 for any other partition. However, installing Ubuntu would work fine in the last remaining partition as long as you don't create a separate Swap partition
Click to expand...

Options that I can think of:

1 - Somehow make Win10 only use one partition (ie. skip boot and recovery partition creation), considering that you have a win7 boot partition already I don't see why this would be impossible as Win10 will take over boot management anyway.
2 - Convert win7 to GPT. I can however confirm that mbr2gpt is not part of the Win7 install (I fired up my Win7 VM and attempted to run it).
3 - Install Win10 onto a separate disk - I'm dual-booting Linux and Win10/11 since 2018 without issues (In UEFI mode, though I don't think MBR will be a problem on two disks).

This post is written first thing in the morning for me on day one of a heavy cold, I've tried my best.
 
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The only relatively simple way to do it without a lot of risk is to use a .vhd file, a virtual hard file, windows does support them natively and can boot them from the boot menu.
That way you don't have to make any changes to your partitions, you just have to find a spot with enough free space, and the OS on the .vhd will have native access to all your hardware, it will just see the hard drive through a layer but as long as you don't do any disk benchmarks you won't even notice.

www.groovypost.com

How-To Install Windows 7 and Dual Boot with XP or Vista using native VHD Support

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Guys, thanks for your further comments. Regarding dual-booting generally, I've had 7,10 and 11 all on one SATA HDD some time back. I've also had 7 and 10 dual booting from an M2 SSD. But I must have used GPT partitioning and had the BIOS set the same way, without knowing I needed to.

My current problem is that I want to add W10 to a W7 500GB M2 SSD and I've created a 120GB partition for that purpose. But W10 won't install there because the 500GB M2 SSD is MBR. Another factor is that I don't want to risk my W7 setup - I've spent too long getting it set up so it does everything I want, perfectly. I'm only installing W10 on my machine (desktop) to learn enough about it to help someone else with their occasional W10 issues.

The easiest way to solve my problem would be to install W10 on a separate disk, but it'll have to be on a spinner, due to the limitations of my Asus board. Also there's only one M2 slot, which is why I wanted to add W10 to the 500GB M2 SSD.

Incidentally, I read somewhere that Disk Genius can change a drive from MBR to GPT (or vice versa) without data loss, but it sounds a bit complicated. Maybe I'll just take the added spinner route.
 
samsinger said:
Guys, thanks for your further comments. Regarding dual-booting generally, I've had 7,10 and 11 all on one SATA HDD some time back. I've also had 7 and 10 dual booting from an M2 SSD. But I must have used GPT partitioning and had the BIOS set the same way, without knowing I needed to.

My current problem is that I want to add W10 to a W7 500GB M2 SSD and I've created a 120GB partition for that purpose. But W10 won't install there because the 500GB M2 SSD is MBR. Another factor is that I don't want to risk my W7 setup - I've spent too long getting it set up so it does everything I want, perfectly. I'm only installing W10 on my machine (desktop) to learn enough about it to help someone else with their occasional W10 issues.

The easiest way to solve my problem would be to install W10 on a separate disk, but it'll have to be on a spinner, due to the limitations of my Asus board. Also there's only one M2 slot, which is why I wanted to add W10 to the 500GB M2 SSD.

Incidentally, I read somewhere that Disk Genius can change a drive from MBR to GPT (or vice versa) without data loss, but it sounds a bit complicated. Maybe I'll just take the added spinner route.
Click to expand...
Why does it have to be a spinner and not just a SATA SSD?
 
Without knowing specific use cases, OP could just run Win10 in a VM.
I hope for his sake that OP never connects to the Internet with a discontinued operating system.
 
samsinger said:
In2Photos: Because, as I noted above, I only have one M2.SSD slot and that's occupied by my system disk.
Click to expand...
My question still applies. If you plan to use a spinner, which refers to a mechanical hard drive, either 2.5" or 3.5", why not use a 2.5" SSD instead? Both require a SATA connection.
 
In2Photos said:
My question still applies. If you plan to use a spinner, which refers to a mechanical hard drive, either 2.5" or 3.5", why not use a 2.5" SSD instead? Both require a SATA connection.
Click to expand...

Also, in case OP is not aware, one can buy 2.5" to 3.5" mounting brackets so the smaller drives will mount perfectly well into almost all desktop PCs.
 
manly said:
Without knowing specific use cases, OP could just run Win10 in a VM.
Click to expand...

I second this.

Vmware Workstation Professional is now free for personal use (you do have to create a Broadcom account to download it, unfortunately, but surprisingly they haven't spammed me yet), and of course as an alternative there is always the free Virtualbox. Running and maintaining a Windows 10 installation under either of them for troubleshooting purposes is very trivial, and you can just delete the VM when you no longer need it. Or, alternatively, to maintain a permanent Win10 VM just for reference purposes you can buy a $10-15 Win10 key to use on the VM from the usual sources.

If you don't plan to use it a lot and you have a spare old spinner drive available, you can store the VM on it. Load times won't be stellar like on an SSD, but it would be more than tolerable for occassional use.
 
you'll want to create a backup image of your current SSD. Software like Macrium Reflect or Acronis True Image is great for this. Just make an image of your existing drive and save it to a temporary storage like a spinner.Next, get the new SSD set up as GPT. You can do this easily in Windows Disk Management. Just initialize the new drive as GPT.After that, restore the image from your temporary drive onto the new GPT SSD using the same software you used for the backup. Make sure you restore the whole disk, not just the files.
Finally, reboot and check that everything’s working as expected. Macrium Reflect and Acronis True Image are your best bets for this job—they’re reliable and get the job done.
 
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