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I am installing a new internal hard drive into my computer that is larger than the old drive. The complication is that the old drive has the operating system partition on it. I want to clone the operating system to a new partition and then start using it as the boot drive. So, in other words the process is like this:
- install new hard drive in an empty bay
- boot the computer using Clonezilla disk
- partition the new drive into four partitions
- clone the old OS partition to the first partition of the new drive
- copy files from other partitions into new partitions
- remove old drive
My concerns are the following:
When I clone the boot partition, it will clone the MBR (master boot record), will this create a problem because the new partition is larger than the old partition, or does the MBR not care about this?
Will the new bootable partition still be the C: drive?
What about the drive mappings for the other partitions on the new drive? I need them to remain the same as they are now on the old drive. There are other drives on the computer. The drive being replaced contains 4 partitions C: D: E: and F:, however, there are also G:, H:, I:, J:, and K: on other drives. When I create the new partitions on the new drive, how do I ensure that these new partitions will be mapped correctly to D, E and F?
Not sure if related, but in reference to your MBR question- When I tried dd'ing a source USB that was 32gb into an ISO, and then pointing to a freshly fat 32 formatted 64gb USB to deploy the image, it does not work. The error I get is failed to mount Sysroot. I'm assuming this has something to do with like you said the MBR being off in size. The only way I have been able to get this to work is to go smaller. I'm not sure why that is, but thought it could hold a few clues in regards to your question! – RickwhoPrograms – 2018-08-22T16:36:44.980
Booting is not related with size partitions. You can use the Clonezilla's "device to device" clone feature to clone exactly as it is, including the MBR. The new drive will (should) boot the exact same way. You may then use another tool to resize/move the partitions in order to use the full space of the new drive. Do NOT create partitions in the new drive. Even if you're just copying a single partition or more, OS or not, you DON'T create partitions in the target. Partitions with exact same characteristics are created in the target during the cloning/copying process. – None – 2018-08-24T22:43:00.947