Clonezilla Disk to Disk Clone for Windows 11, 10, 8, 7

About Clonezilla disk to disk clone

Clonezilla is one open source cloning and imaging software which has three available types including Clonezilla live, Clonezilla lite server and Clonezilla SE. Clonezilla live supports single machine backup and restore, while Clonezilla lite server or SE is for massive deployment.

The tool supports various system including Linux, Mac OS, Windows, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, and more. Users can use Clonezilla for system backup, full drive clone, system deploy, etc.

Now you are planning to replace your old hard drive for better performance. To make it, Clonezilla is a good choice that can help you clone your entire drive to the new drive directly. It just makes use of these used blocks to save and restore files which increases the clone efficiency.

But since Clonezilla does not have a user-friendly GUI, some users may feel difficult to use it. In addition, there are some limitations you should know:

• The destination partition must be equal or larger than the source one. In other words, Clonezilla cannot help you clone larger drive to smaller drive. This may disappoint users who tend to clone to a different size disk.

• Many users have reported the Clonezilla failed to clone issue. Where there’s a bad sector on your disk, there’s a high probability that you will encounter this problem. A bad sector is a tiny cluster of storage space that cannot be used to read or write data, so likely Clonezilla fails due to the bad sector.

In the next part, we will show you how to use Clonezilla disk to disk clone to copy your hard drive. If you want to clone larger drive to smaller drive, please refer to Part 2 to get the solution.

• Part 1. How to clone disk to disk with Clonezilla
• Part 2. Clonezilla alternative - available to clone larger drive to smaller drive

Part 1. How to clone disk to disk with Clonezilla

Here in this part, you will know how to use Clonezilla disk to disk clone feature. Please make sure the destination partition must be equal or larger than the source one.

Step 1. Prepare Clonezilla live.

Go to Clonezilla download page to get Clonezilla live. Here we put Clonezilla live on the new hard drive and use it to boot Clonezilla. Please make sure there’s a bootable partition on your hard drive to boot it. Or you can put Clonezilla live in bootable CD or USB.

Step 2. Boot the Clonezilla.

Insert the new hard drive that is bootable with Clonezilla live to your computer and boot Clonezilla live.

Step 3. Choose “ToRAM” option in the boot menu.

Select “Other modes of Clonezilla live” in boot menu. The choose “Clonezilla live (TO RAM, Boot media can be removed later)”. In this way, all the Clonezilla live file on SSD will be copied to RAM, so the partition of SSD can be released.

Step 4. Select language.

Step 5. Choose keyboard layout.

Step 6. Choose “Start Clonezilla”.

Select “Start Clonezilla” > “device-device work directly from a disk or partition to a disk or partition” > “Beginner mode: Accept the default options”.

Step 7. Choose “Disk-to-local-disk”.

Step 8. Select source disk.

Step 9. Select target disk.

You can choose to check the source file system, or you can just choose to “Skip checking/repairing source file system”.

Step 10. Start cloning.

Clonezilla will ask confirmation several times like asking about cloning boot loader to target disk, and asks confirmation about cloning data from source disk.

Step 11. Disk is cloning.

Select “Poweroff” and then your machine will be halted. And your new hard drive is ready to be used.

As you can see, the whole process is kind of complicated also time-consuming, especially for the newbie. Cloning disk with Clonezilla needs lots of steps which may make you confused. And it cannot help you clone larger drive to smaller drive. Fortunately, there’s one easy-to-use Clonezilla alternative which can help you finish the job without effort. Just keep reading to get it.

Part 2. Clonezilla alternative - available to clone larger drive to smaller drive

AOMEI Backupper Standard is one free backup, clone, sync, and recovery software for Windows users. Supports all Windows OS including Windows 10/8/7. It can help you clone hard drive easily with its Disk Clone feature. Compared to Clonezilla disk to disk clone, AOMEI Backupper can provide you a more wonderful performance.

1. It supports cloning larger drive to smaller drive, such as clone 500GB HDD to 250GB SSD.

2. It offers different cloning solutions: disk clone and partition clone. You can choose to clone the entire hard drive or only selected partitions as per your needs.

3. It will ignore bad sectors while cloning to ensure a successful clone.

In addition, AOMEI Backupper has an easy-to-use interface unlike Clonezilla’s text-based interface. You can easily achieve clone job with AOMEI Backupper’s friendly GUI. Check the following steps to see how to clone hard disk with this powerful tool.

Note that this software will only clone used sectors to target disk, thus, you can clone Windows 10 to new hard drive successfully, even smaller one. Please be sure the target disk has enough space to hold all the data on the source disk.

Step 1. Download, install and launch AOMEI Backupper.

Step 2. Click Clone and then choose Disk Clone.

Step 3. Select the source disk and click Next.

Step 4. Select your new hard drive as the destination to clone the source drive to. Then click Next to continue.

Step 5. Check the operation summary and click Start Clone. If you are cloning hard drive to an SSD, check "SSD Alignment" to improve the speed of reading and writing as well as prolong the service life of SSD.

Notes:

👉 "Edit partitions" allows you to resize partitions on the larger destination disk and convert disk types if necessary. It's available in Professional edition.

• Copy without resizing partitions: It will not resize the partition size.
• Add unused space to all partitions: It will reallocate the unallocated space to each partition of the target disk, appropriate for the disk size.
• Manually adjust partition size: It allows you to extend unallocated space to any partition on the destination disk you want. 
• Convert the destination disk from MBR to GPT: It helps to convert the partition style of the destination disk if it is different from the source disk. 

👉 Select "Sector by sector clone" if you want to clone every sector no matter it is used or not, even it’s a blank sector or a logical bad sector.

 👉 The free version of AOMEI Backupper only supports cloning all the data disk and MBR system disks. To GPT to GPT, GPT to MBR or vice versa, please upgrade to the professional vesion.

Both MBR and GPT are two different disk types for data storage. And you can check its disk properties in Disk Management. The overall steps are below:

• Press Win + R to open the Run window. Then, type diskmgmt.msc and hit OK to open disk management.
• Then, right-click the disk you want to clone and select Properties in the pop-up window.
• In the Properties window, select the Volume tab and confirm the partition style. It can be MBR (Master Boot Record) or GPT (GUID Partition Table).

• Similarly, check the disk partition tyle of the destination disk. If it is still MBR, you can clone hard drive to SSD for free. 

Conclusion

Now you know how to use Clonezilla disk to disk clone feature. Compared to Clonezilla, AOMEI Backupper is a better choice when it comes to cloning hard drive. It can help you easily clone larger hard drive to smaller hard drive.

Besides, it is more than an alternative to Clonezilla. It is also regarded as an extraordinary free backup and restore software. It offers various backup & restore options to keep your data safe. Such as restore computer to an earlier date when you need.