Make dual boot by cloning the system drive
A partition and disk imaging/cloning program
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steven_shiau
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Hello,
I guess this maybe isn't directly related to Clonezilla, and may have been asked before (I've searched with no luck). Hope it's alright anyhow.
I'm new to Clonezilla and I've cloned my system drive (with Clonezilla live) from a NVMe drive to another identical drive, but in different ports. So far so good. My target was to make a dual boot from/to the same Windows 10 installation. I know this isn't the main purpose for Clonezilla, and I've read that you should remove one of the drives after cloning, but I figured I should be able to make it work somehow. But I can't manage to boot from the cloned drive, but the source drive (still) works.
For me the ideal way to boot my cloned drive would be from BIOS/UEFI and just override the primary boot drive (I've tried and it doesn't work now). I.e. just select to boot the cloned drive through UEFI, no other boot list or so, and by default my computer should boot to my "original" system without hiccups. Is this doable in some way? If not, is there any other solution?
Thanks for a great software.
Last edit: Helmer Hemlin 2024-08-30
Update in this matter:
After some research I have realized that this is a bigger problem (for many) than I thought..
I have tried to fix the EFI boot partition on my cloned disk. I figured that it maybe was pointing to the same (source) disk on both my drives, and I guess it was. I succeeded with this and was able to boot my cloned drive. But upon logging in I got a system warning for sihost.exe saying "Unknown hard error" and just a black screen. My thoughts were that maybe the whole system was pointing to the source disk. I checked drive letters, tried Windows repair etc, but nothing worked.
So then I decided to do a whole fresh install of Windows to the disk I previously was cloning to, and then do a disk image of just the original Windows partition instead of cloning the whole drive. Everything worked out with the fresh install, and I was able to boot both systems without problems. Then I did a disk image with Clonezilla and restored it to the new drive/partition, and it worked out fine. But then again, upon logging in, I got the same error as before - "unknown hard error" from sihost.exe.
I'm guessing I'm trying to do something that isn't doable, not in this way at least. Obviously I can just do a fresh install of Windows and be happy with that. But since my original install is heavily tweaked and contains many programs, settings etc., I would like to just clone it instead of backing everything up and tweaking it all over again.. But maybe that isn't possible.
Alright, I finally got it working!
For documentation purposes, if anyone ever will face the same problem, this was the solution.
I booted the cloned Windows to the login screen, pressed shift while clicking the power button to the down right and chose restart. This is to get the advanced start settings to be able to enable safe mode. Probably is several solutions for this, but I did it like this and then rebooted.
Then I started in safe mode with command prompt, logged in and the "unknown hard error" showed. Clicked that away and after a while the command prompt pops up, then start diskpart and list volumes to check what drive letters the disks/volumes have. The original disk/volume will probably still have the C: letter, and this is what you need to change. Check what your cloned disk is mounted as, in my case it was D:.
Press ctrl+shift+esc to start task manager. Then file menu, run new task and type regedit (the registry editor). Browse to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices and change/rename the key \DosDevices\C: to some letter not taken, I chosed U:. Then change/rename the cloned drive letter, in my case the \DosDevices\D: to \DosDevices\C:, and that was the trick. Reboot and log in, hopefully everything works. I chosed to disable the original disk in the device manager also. Hop e I don't run in to any other problems, like the Windows update. Time will tell.
And although I had restored an disk image for this like I wrote in my last post, I believe it would have been the same solution with the drive clone (after fixing the EFI partition) as well.
Thanks for a great software.
Great. Thanks for sharing that.
Steven
Thanks i had the same issue cloning using DISM and same after cloning with clonezilla and i could not understand why.