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answerSeeker
Asked: 2017-12-10 19:00:55 +0800 CST

backup windows partitions with dd [duplicate]

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I am on Ubuntu, I have 2 external hard drives, of of them is an SSD. The HDD is from a laptop with windows 10 on it, the SSD is completely empty, I want to use it to copy everything on the HDD to the SSD. I'm using a powered usb 3.0 hub with 2 sata to USB 3.0 cables to connect the drives to my computer.

I was going to this with dd but I realized windows has many partitions, sdb1(C:\ drive), sdb2(EFI system partition), sdb3 (Microsoft reserved partions), sdb4(basic data partition). How can I copy all of them to the SSD using dd?

16.04

1 Answers

  1. Assuming Win10 HDD = sda and blank SSD = sdc

    Rather than using dd for each individual partition, use it on the block device as a whole.

    For example, rather than copying from /dev/sdb1 and /dev/sdb2 and so on, just copy from /dev/sdb

    So you can do something like:

    dd if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/sdc bs=4M
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