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Question

Using nothing but the usual relevant Linux utilities like parted, fdisk, ntfsclone, et cetera, in addition to whatever tools come with Windows, like bcdboot and dism, how can one copy or clone an existing Windows 10 installation from one disk to an arbitrary location on another disk? For example, from /dev/sdc42 to /dev/sdp23. Obviously, it must be bootable by the end of the process.

Possible Solutions

My guess of the solution was to

  1. ensure that an EFI system partition (ESP) exists on the target device,
  2. create a partition on the target device that is the same size as the old (existing) Windows partition,
  3. ntfsclone the old partition to the destination,
  4. use bcdboot from the old installation to copy the BCD stuff of the new installation to the ESP of the target disk, and
  5. attempt to boot into the new installation whilst crossing fingers.

but after a couple of attempts, that did not seem to work the way I did it. Continuing from step 2 above, my current guess is now to, as described by this post

  1. use dism (from a separate Windows environment, such as Windows PE) to capture an image of the old (existing) Windows installation,
  2. apply the image to the newly created partition, and
  3. use bcdboot to copy the BCD files from the new partition to the ESP of the new disk.

Note

I know I could just use a convenient tool like Clonezilla or something, but I want to learn the process of doing it manually this way.

0 Answers0