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After a full Windows factory settings reset, I have a laptop with multiple partitions and a freshly installed Windows 8 on an 500GB hard-disk. I need to make a fully recoverable hard-disk image/copy/clone of all partitions, tables and sectors on a smaller hard-disk.
Since only about 50GB (10%) are used I would prefer to make a "bundled image" of all partitions including MBR/GPT, etc. on an smaller hard-disk. The scope: be able to quickly recover the precise actual system setup state -- including the fresh Windows installation (with all updates, settings, and software installations I've now made), recovery and service partitions, boot-loader, partition-table, etc.. In between I want to format the whole disk and use the laptop as an Debian Linux machine without any Windows options/partitions.
Since I'm about 1y in Linux, I'm neither freak nor noob. So feel free to provide the solutions you find the best and most reliable(!).
(After searching a bit for a good solutions, asked me how it would be if I minimize the size of the Windows partition -- let's say 50GB -- and let the space remaining unallocated. So the size of the allocated partitions would be about 60GB. Then cloning _all_the_allocated_partitions_ with something like Clonezilla or dd. I would prefer to use an Live Debian 8 (Jessie) CD for the operation. Could this work?)
alex
Posted 2016-11-13T20:25:42.873
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I'm pretty sure software recommendations are off-topic here. Try at SR.SE. Personally I would recommend Macrium Reflect (using Re-Deploy to restore an image to even different hardware)
– GiantTree – 2016-11-13T21:31:18.833@GiantTree: Thank you for your input. Will wait a bit for more proposals and then decide about Macrium. However, Software Recommendations is really nice -- did not know about it. Thanks :) – alex – 2016-11-13T22:46:36.767
Just use whatever Clone/Backup program you have available. You'd be able to easily do it on the same machine. If you really want to go with Linux you could try
ddand gzip it afterwards to see if that helps. – Seth – 2016-11-15T12:50:51.230@Seth Thank you :) How could I precisely set (limit) the
if=size of multiple partitions, bootloader, & MBR. AFAIKddis taking the whole disk. I'm not really aware howddworks -- used it only on, relatively small, USB-install-keys --, what output file format doesddhave? – alex – 2016-11-15T14:29:00.053