Consider such a scenario: When you need to upgrade from a mechanical hard drive to a solid state drive, or if you have no more space on the system drive’s SSD, you need to expand it. If your system contains a lot of important things. If reinstalling the system and software is too cumbersome, you definitely want to be able to move the system completely to the new disk. So is there any simpler, faster and more effective way to achieve this? The answer is certainly yes, let’s take a look at how to use the Clonezilla to achieve this.

Extended reading: Clonezilla introduction and how to make a Clonezilla bootable U disk

Use Clonezilla to backup and restore Win10 system

I. Why choose Clonezilla ?

Why not choose symantec ghost (should be the most used software for domestic backup and restore system) and backup and restore software such as diskgenus? Mainly based on two points:
1. The old version of ghost is not good for win10 support, including gpt partitions.
2. The speed of them are slower than Clonezilla. The backup and restore speed of Clonezilla is almost 10 times that of the above two softwares. In my test, the ghost is almost 2 hours, the diskgenus is more than an hour, and the Clonezilla takes only 10 minutes!

II. Necessary conditions

1. The new hard drive or partition used to restore the system must be larger than the backup system. For example: your previous system disk C drive is a mechanical hard drive, C drive partition 100G, then now if you want to replace with SSD solid state drive, this solid state drive needs more than 100G!
2. There is already a Clonezilla to boot the USB flash drive. If you still can’t make it, you can refer to my other article:
   https://www.iemblog.com/?p=1160&lang=en
3. There is a bootable USB flash drive or CD with a PE system. If you haven’t already, you can make another one from my articles:
   https://www.iemblog.com/?p=1254&lang=en

III. Preparation

1. Connect the new disk to the motherboard
   The next preparatory work is divided into two cases:
2. If the previous system is on a separate hard disk, such as a 128G SSD solid state hard disk for the system disk, then you do not need to do the following preparations.
3. Traditional mechanical hard disk, in addition to the C disk system disk and other partitions as data disks, then the following work needs to be done:
   1). Restart the system, select the U disk with the PE system from the startup item to enter the PE system, start the partition software such as diskgenus, and then the whole disk (ie old disk) where the system that needs to be backed up is located. Make a backup of the partition table, and then restore the partition table just backed up on the disk that the system needs to be restoreed (ie new disk).

IV. Backup and restore

1. Restart the system, select the Clonezilla from the boot option to start the U disk, enter the Clonezilla, and most of the steps can be found in my article:
   https://www.iemblog.com/?p=1160&lang=zh#102
   The only difference is that we need to change device-image to device-device.
   The latter two options are the same as the above preparations, and need to be operated according to the system partition of the old disk:
2. If the previous system is on a separate hard disk, such as a 128G SSD solid state hard disk for the system disk, and the new disk is only intended to be used as a system disk alone, you can choose disk-disk mode.
3. In addition to the above situation, all other cases select partition-partition. In this case, because we have created a partition table for the new disk, so the work we have to do is to back up the system-related partitions and restore the corresponding partition on the new disk. Need to pay attention to: the system-related partitions may not only be the partition where the system data is located, but also includehidden recovery partitions,boot partitions’, etc., we need to put the data partition front with The relevant partitions are backed up.
4. After backing up a partition, if you still need to back up the next partition, you can enter the Clonezilla without restarting the system. You can choose to back up again directly in the revision option.

V. Confirm that the new disk system is working properly.

1. Open the chassis, uninstall the old disk in the motherboard, and keep only the new disk.
2. Restart and enter Bios, make sure that the First Start item is New Disk, save and exit.
3. If you can enter the system normally after restarting the system, congratulations, you have basically completed the whole work!

VI. Extra work

1. Open the chassis and plug in the old one again.
2. Enter the PE, use the partitioning tool such as diskgenus to delete the system partition and related system restore and boot partitions of the previous old disk, and then delete the unused partitions as needed. Assign and format.
3. Restart and enter the win10 system. If you open My Computer, you will find that there is only one disk partition of the new disk. What happened? Don’t worry, follow the steps below to solve:
   Open Disk Management (in the win10 search barEnter Disk, select Create and format the hard disk in the search results), Select the old disk, click Right mouse, just select in the pop-up menu Online!