Cloning Windows Drives

2025/03/22

TLDR

  1. Use clonezilla but don’t proportionally copy, do a 1-for-1 disk to disk copy
  2. Use gparted to move the partitions to the very end of the disk that follow after your C drive
  3. Boot into windows and use the disk management utility to expand the C drive

The Problem

I recently needed to migrate a drive from a 512GB SSD running windows 10 to a larger 2TB drive. I’ve done this in the past plenty of times with Clonezilla but I ran into a problem this time.

I did a proportional clone for a disk-to-disk with Clonezilla but windows failed to boot properly. I ended up getting getting into a blue screen during the boot process that had the error code 0xc0000225 and unable to find the file windows\system32\winload.exe. I created a windows 10 installation thumb drive and attempted to recover the new drive. I tried all the various bootrec tools to no avail. I verified that I cloned from a MBR to MBR and not GPT. I also tried one more time and it still failed.

What I tried that didn’t work

  1. I removed the old drive so it wasn’t interferring
  2. I physically moved the sata connections around
  3. I made sure the new drive was in the first boot slot in the bios
  4. I tried using bootrec, diskpart, bcdedit,
  5. I tried cloning again

The Solution

I then tried cloning in Clonezilla without a proportional copy. This time it worked and I was able to boot sucessfully. Since the boot drive now worked I wanted to expand the C volume but I couldn’t because the default windows installation has either has 3 or 4 partions with the C drive sandwiched between. So I installed gparted on a thumb drive and moved the recovery partition, which was the partition after the C partition, to the end of the disk. This worked well and went very fast. I then booted back into windows and use the disk utilties there to expand the C volume.