I love when people explain how to use core utilities instead of weird proprietary software. Thanks!

I appreciate when someone takes the time to not only explain what to do, but why we need to do it. Actually understanding the process helps me remember it in the future. Great tutorial, worked perfectly for me. Thanks!

Best explanation I've seen on the drive partitioning and copying/cloning subject!

This is how tutorials should be made, well done sir

This was a wonderful video. I am a computer tech but I learned several things that I didn't know about the drive utilities dd and gparted. Thank you so very much!

Came across this and tried it today going from 4TB to a 750GB drive, worked flawlessly! Thanks for the video.

This is quite possibly the best tutorial and explanation of this process that I have seen ever. The theory is correct, the process simply works, and you are left with an understanding of why and how.

I was cloning my Linux Lite from a 500G HDD to a 120G SSD. Unexpectedly, the Gparted bootable usb somehow didn't work on my laptop - boot failed by some firmware error - but I used a workaround - my Linux Lite OS live bootable usb, which contains Gparted and DD by default! Beside the booting, the rest part of the operations were the same with what has been demonstrated in your video, and it ended up with a success! I appreciate that you not only presented what the steps are, but also explained how it worked under the hood! Thank you so much for the tutorial!

Thank you very much! i was needing to clone the OS from a laptop harddrive to an SSD while searching about this process, i only found videos about proprietary software that was ""free"" (30 days trial before needing to buy it) but i knew that Linux probably had such a feature built into it, so i took my bootable Ubunto USB stick, searched about drive cloning in Linux, and found your video, which solved my problem the cloning was from a 500GB's HDD to a 500GB's SSD, so the entire process went on flawlessly and i didn't even needed to mess with disk partitions, again, thank you very much for your great tutorial on that subject!

super explicit, and clear. Thanks for the info!

Thank you! I was able to move my 1TB Windows HDD into a 512GB SSD all thanks to this video. You easily helped explain the steps and their reasons for the migration. No more proprietary cloning software madness, good ol FOSS utils to save the day!

Best video ever on DD and partition tables ! Thanks a lot 👍

Your a wizard and an absolute life saver, every other way of cloning seemed to fail I wish I found this 2 weeks ago. Honestly thank you so much, and for your detailed explanation of the tools!!

Your tutorial is the most compregensive and easy to follow. Tried a bunch of windows program to duplicate an iptv/vod server drive, but every time it failed to boot. When I found this linux based software I was sure it will do the job opposed to the Windows junk free programs. The trick was actualy the fix you did at the end with gdisk. Server is up and running again. Thank you!

Awesome video! Been a while since I cloned disks and I learned some new cmds! Love how you explain everything!

I finally stopped procrastinating and did my first clone with dd. I found it extremely straight forward and using the lsblk command, I could see exactly what and where each of my drives were, so for me, there was absolutely no confusion as to the source, the live and the destination. Your instructions were flawless and easy to follow and dd and gparted worked like a charm. It's a daunting process the first time round, but knowing whats happening while it's happening makes it a lot easier. And when that cloned drive just booted straight up (linux/win dual boot)...I was more than impressed. Shout out to you brother.... Thanks for your video and sharing your knowledge and obvious talent for these things.

This is really helpful, both the tutorial and also the explanation. Thanks!

very nice video. Just need too add that before running dd check, check again and again which is the source drive and especially important which is the target drive. source drive must be specified in if= and target drive must be after of=. If you put it in wrong order or specify a different drive as target it will destroy your data. Never happened with me, but just for those who uses tool like dd first time - be very careful. In right hands dd is super useful tool which allows to copy any data to different drive, but if it used incorrectly it will be "disk destroyer". For GParted it's also a powerful tool, but it has GUI, which means less likely to make a fatal mistake.

I found the scenario you chose-cloning from a larger drive to a smaller one-really usefull. Most guides tend to focus on copying from smaller to larger drives, so your approach was refreshing. As an additional tip, you might want to consider using Gparted, which is available in most Linux distributions. If you already have a Live Linux distro pen drive, you can use it to resize partitions in a similar manner. Thanks for sharing!

Excellent video! You include details a lot of others neglect.

It's evident you have a fundamental understanding of the Way of the Machine. Thx for sharing with us, your channel is a gem.

Great as usual. Inthe same line of the recovery/copy tools, one thing I recently discovered is Ventoy, you should make a video showing how to use one pendrive for everything. Anyway, just after finishing watching this video, I dropped the GParted iso that you just suggested. Great tool and great procedure!! Mate, I really enjoy all of your videos

Your tutorial works like a charm -- and the explanation is complete and succinct. Thank you very much!

I can't thank you enough. You saved me a lot of painful hours. I tried a bunch of propriety software and they limited what I could do unless I paid some money. I wish I found your video earlier. I would save even more time.

A fantastically well put together explanation. This really is the number 1 tutorial for performing this commonly troublesome operation. Thank you.

Excellent. I've been looking high and low for a video and/or instructions on how to a clone a bootable linux Hard drive to a smaller drive. This is the only one that produced a fully functioning bootable drive. Thanks!

Thanks for the video man, just used this to clone my Proxmox install from a 128gb SSD to a 500gb SSD after Rescuezilla threw LVM unmounting errors. You're the bomb!

Man, once _again_ you saved my time. Wanted to change ssd in one of my laptops for smaller and already began to DL clonezilla, but remembered that at least years ago its interface was atrocious to say in slightest. So decided to checkout if someone has made tutorial about cloning drives in linux and it was about as close what I thought might work, but I've always sucked with DD. Your tips worked 100% though I didn't need to work with that recovery part as it was btrfs system. Thank you! Once again 🙂

best explanation i have found about dd and gparted… subscribed :D and thank you for sharing your knowledge and explaining so well

To my delight, I i was moving from a SATA using the same amount of space as your old drive was using, to an NVMe of the exact same capacity. I was able to follow along step by step, and accomplish something much more "difficult" then my current skill level. Thanks!

Thanks for this. I have not tried this yet but have been researching it and fully believe what you are saying.

Just used this method to clone a dual boot windows/popos and it worked like a charm! Thank you!

GREAT VIDEO ! Just found your channel, subscribed and will be going through past videos and watching for more!

this video is worth gold, great explanation and actually useful utilities. Thanks

Great explanation of the whole process and tools! Thank you!

Wow awesome. I love the part where you fix the partition tables.

Amazingly well done and explained in a way that works for Linux beginners. Keep it up!

Simple and to the point. Well done.

This is a great walkthrough! Much appreciated. Subscribed!

Very well presented tutorial as usual. Thank you.

Worked like a charm, thanks for the video!

This is exactly the video I needed. Thank you.

Thanks for this GREAT tutorial! I cloned my nvme drive like a boss thanks to this video! 👍👍👍

Excellent explanation of dd. Finally.

This dudes underrated

Fantastic demonstration, Thank you.

Thank you for making these videos !

Excellent video. The command @<a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="430">7:10</a> is worth the price of admission.

Thanks man this worked perfectly. Even my VMs and passthroughs are working just like earlier.

Good content, Is nice to view what is going on inside disks

Thanks! Helped me a lot. I was trying to migrate the partitions from a Raspberry Pi 4 bootable disk, to another, with Clonezilla, but that wouldn't boot up, although the gdisk command said, there was a valid MBR. So I tried cloning with the dd command, and it worked like a charm. I used GParted for the whole lot, as I don't have a Linux computer.

Super useful video, thanks a lot!!

Thank you learned some new issues using dd.

It was so good! It was so precious! Thanks!

This worked well and is much easier to understand and use than...all the packed (not!) easier solutions. And with a live USB linux, I have a great tool for lots of situations. Thanks!!

Excellent video. Thanks! 🙂

Way useful: outstanding video !!!!!

Gotta decrypt the bitlocker first. Good video.

This helps a lot, thanks!

awesome tutorial, thanks

Thank you for this tutorial, i need to copy my Proxmox boot drive from a SAS drive to an NVME drive.

Thanks a lot bro, so useful. Best wishies

Like the approach.

thanks a lot - very useful for me

awesome! thanks for explaining this

super helpful, thanks

Thank you.

VERY VERY helpful- thank you for this @ElectronicsWizardry !! I am trying to learn HDD and SSD digital forensics/recovery on my own, organically but not studying a lot first - so your video is monumentally educational!! Some great commands for you and others out there are 'pv' and 'dialog' to see progress bars like this => #######[ ], and dialog creates a sort of 8bit color graphical screen and progress meter. I am still struggling with understanding the TABLE at the beginning of the drive or block device but still reading up a lot ; also, if I have say a 2TB HDD and 'clone into it' a 500gb SDD using DD, is it ok to (as I have tried) simply use if=/dev/zero and of=(the 2TB HDD) to rezero the drive then just DROP the 500gb 'image' (raw data) over using dd, or should I MAKE a /dev/sdb1 "container" of say, ext4 (linux fs) first and 'spray' the 500gb of data into the /dev/sdb1 ? I think for forensics it doesn't matter. OH another great tool is 'testdisk' part of the 'photorec' suite of tools, for you and your Subscribers. Have a great day- I look fwd to your reply if you have time to write back =) Thanks again

Thank you so so much!

Finally m out of deep shit.. uffff your video saved my ass bro 🙏☝️🔥🔥🔥👌👌😌❤️🥰🥰🥰🥰🥰. M feeling peace & relaxed.. Lots & lots of love from India ❤️ bro 🤝

Thank you for sharing your knowledge. I had no idea you could move the partition, the way you did with gparted. A while back i googled about if its possible but all the results i found were to pay $ for some program. i think AOME or something.. Had no idea you could do that with Gparted. Gonna use the shrinking option before i backup my raspberry pi sdcard to be restored later to a smaller sd. Would be great if you did a video about that i think.. There is a lot of questions on that online. But people just suggest to use windows program, or just to use the dd without shrinking the partition first. Thank you

Great video / review! Video idea: Same thing but with linux LVM

Very nice tut, I was able to clone a macos w/win hdd to ssd. At first I couldn't open gparted, because it throwed me the error "Invalid argument during seek for read". I looked for an answer on internet, but were too complicated, however the problem was the one you explained at the end, macos doesn't have a gpt backup table at the end of the drive. So I had to applay gdisk twice, before and after cloning. I don't know what would've done without you help. Thanks in advance!

great video. I want to suggest also using Macrium Reflekt, which also has a WinRE USB creator utility which can be used to spool a recovery system with the app running and perform whatever you need. Reflekt has a free trial which works fine without payment last I checked. It also uses Windows/Microsoft's imaging tech which makes the process almost as quick as with DD.

Damn good video....

Good stuff

It was a helpful tutorial. I wonder if increasing the block size to something larger like 100M or 1G will increase the copying speed when cloning NVME ?

Muchas gracias!!! Genial!

When many partitions are included with various sizes on the source disk, can i skip any partitions that otherwise wouldn't fit on the target disk?

Thank you for the video. I know how to move the unused space in the middle now. Lately i used kde partition and elena ecther. As newbie i prefer with gui. Elena etcher take longer to clone than rescuezilla.

Thank you so much for creating this video. I was able to downsize my 512 gb drive to 526 gb! You’re a wizard 🧙🏽‍♂️! Now I am trying to do the reverse, and moving an old 50 pin SCSI 1 gb drive to another 50 pin SCSI 2 gb drive. But I’m running into boot issues. Any chance you could help? Really appreciate you.

great. Thanks..

would this work for a dual boot windows pop os system? im trying to clone my drive to a larger one and I have win and popos partitions but havent been able to do it

Thanks

Kudos for also mentioning gdisk.

Please tell how to clone between m.2 of same size. I had some issues with partition management. Like my system reserved partition gets fixed in middle

Idk if i did somthing wrong or what, but im trying to move a 1tb hdd to a 500gb ssd, and every thing looked right cloned over just fine, reset the partitions...but the ssd i cloned to wont boot when i solo boot

Great Video. Question: I used dd to clone a Windows 10 drive from 500gb to 1TB. After clone, I can see partition and I can boot into Windows for the new drive. The issue I noticed back in GDisk, the 'Main Header' and 'Main Partition Table" show 'ERROR'. And for the partition table scan, 'MBR: Only' and 'GPT: Damaged'.. I tried the "r", "bc" and "e" options but I loose all partitions. In the GParted gui, I can move/reorg partitions (the "Win RE" and "msftres") to utilize the extra disk space, however, I would like to fix Headers and convert to GPT. What's your advice?

Great tutorial. I have an MBR disk with three win versions, and linux, and I have had a tough time cloning it to a slightly smaller ssd disk... evrything else failed even clonezilla

How would this be done from the command line?

Nice video. Will this method work for replacing the old small 22GB nvme part of a mac fusion drive, with bootcamp, to a larger and faster nvme? Already replaced HDD with SSD. Thanks.

Please suggest. I want to clone my laptop hdd which has 7 partitions wjith each partition having 7 windows installation. My pc asks me wh9ch os to load when i boot. I want to make an exact clone woth all patlrrs and os also. I tried true image but no success please help

Thanks=

Why did it have that 1MiB of unallocated space between the last 2 partitions? Will that ever cause an issue in certain circumstances?

Will this work to clone 1 external 12 tb harddrive (usbc) to another external 12 tb external harddrive also (usbc) connected thru my laptop? Or is there an eaier way? Thank you !!

Can dd be used to clone a ZFS NVME proxmox boot drive? Does dd run from the Gparted live usb stick?

question, where does dd "start" to copy in the output disk? I want to backup a windows system and i have 300gb free at the end of another disk with linux installed, is it going to overwrite my linux partitions, or just ignore them?

I had a uninicialized drive and use DD because had lots of important data. But now I don't know how to put that DD file on a disk. my doubt is if I put that file in a drive, that disk will have the same problem? how can I retrieve that data?

Great Tutoria - Q: I have a QNAP NAS with a 500GB SSD, I need to clone it with a 4TB SSD on my Windows PC - Can I use DD & GParted for Linux drive? will these tools read Linux partitions?

Is there a way to convert a .img or vhdx to a .iso?