Using Command Line Prompt to Clone System and Disk

Why clone disk via command line

Cloning could solve a lot of problems. Sometimes, users may clone the whole disk to another external hard drive to avoid the data loss when there is any accident. Or they may clone the system so that they can restore system when there is something wrong with the system, or they can use it to migrate system to another disk or computer. Clone is widely used. And you can clone disk, system, partition.

For users who have less computer experience, cloning hard drive using GUI may be more simple and straightforward. But for IT experts and advanced users, cloning via command prompt may save much time and effort, avoiding the cumbersome clicking steps and some potential errors.

How to perform command line clone in Windows

To use CMD to clone for Windows, here we highly recommend you AOMEI Backupper, a software which provides you clone disk, partition, system with command line.

First, you need to install and launch AOMEI Backupper Professional (if you are using Windows Server, it has the specially Server edition for you).

Then, run the command line prompt as administrator. You can click Start, type “cmd” at the search box and right click it, select “Run as Administrator”, or you can press "WIN+R" to open the “Run” window and type “cmd” to open the command line prompt.

To get in AOMEI Backupper command line prompt, you need to type in the following command and press Enter:

This means open the path “C:\Program Files\AOMEI Backupper”, which is the installation directory of AOMEI Backupper. If you installed the application in other location, enter it to replace the C:, because the path must match the installation directory of the program you installed.

Then, you can follow the parameters to clone according to your requirement.

For clone, there are many required parameters:

{/c}: clone system, partition, disk or dynamic volume;

{/t}{system | disk | part}: specify clone type. "system" means system clone; "disk" means disk clone; "part" means cloning patition or dynamic volume;

[/s] {0 | 0:0 | D}: specify the source to be cloned. No need to specify the source while performing system clone; /s 0 means cloning disk 0; /s 0:0 means cloning partition 0 on disk 0; /s D means to clone partition D or dynamic D;

{/d} {0 | 0:0 | D}: specify destination location./d 0 means the specified destination location is disk 0;/d 0:0 means the specified destination location is partition 0 on disk 0; /d D means the specified destination location is partition D or dynamic volume D;

[/k]: specify to use Sector by sector clone;

[/a]: specify to use partition alignment to optimize for SSD;

[/l] {A~Z}: specify the drive letter of the new partition after cloning;

[/f]{fill | original}: adjust the size of the destination partition. "fill" means to fill the entire destination partition after cloning; "original" means to keep the same size as the source partition after cloning. This command is not available for dynamic disks;

[/o] {yes | no}: switch of the interactive prompt."yes" means to execute automatically the next operation when interactive operation is needed; "no" means to cancel the operation when interactive operation is needed. By default, the program will wait for user's confirmation;

Those are all the parameters you may use in command line cloning. You may take system clone as example.

Clone with CMD

How to clone with AOMEI Backupper CMD? You can clone system to partition D in use, and neglect interactive prompt to complete the operation with the following commands:

As the picture shows:

Or you can clone system to partition 1 on disk 2 with this parameter:

Besides cloning system, you can also clone partition or disk as you want. If you want to clone disk 1 to disk 2 and using partition alignment to optimize for SSD, this parameter can be used:

In addition, using command line to clone is very convenient because it can finish the job just input the parameters and click Enter instead of the multiple steps of interface. But you must know the parameters. Or you’d better use the GUI to clone for your Windows because it only needs some few clicks. Don’t worry, both AOMEI Backupper GUI and command line support Windows 10/8/7. Besides, you can still use the AOMEI Backupper interface to copy one hard drive to another and many other operations.