Windows – Cloning a SSD using GPT not working (Clonezilla)

bootpartitioningssduefiwindows

I am using Windows 8.1 Pro installed on a 128 GB SSD, partition-table is GPT. My Asus Mainboard uses UEFI and i installed windows 8.1 as a uefi installation. Therefore the first boot device is selected as "Windows Boot Manager", it's perfectly working and it's really fast. Now i bought a new bigger SSD. I plugged it in and booted with clonezilla to clone the whole disk (disk2disk mode) to the new SSD.
I cloned it, turned the pc off and disconnected the old ssd. Turned it on and it didn't start windows, after the EFI-initialization it stayed black. Now i booted with a windows 8.1 stick(only my new cloned ssd is plugged in) and selected the "computer repair options" and navigated to trouble shooting and used the automatic repair.
I waited about ~a hour and assumed that it crashed (allthough the circle was still moving). I restarted and tried it again now i am getting instantly the error message that automatic repair couldnt fix my problem.

The only option is to run the terminal and try to fix it.

What can i do in order to use my new SSD with my old windows installation. A complete new installation is no option at the moment.
Thank you very much.

Best Answer

I don't know if the problem is exactly the same as mine. But I left here my cent.

I have tried a disc to disc clone from a 930GiB HDD (source drive) with a GPT partition table to 890GiB SSD (destination). Please note I am a Linux user and I have a dual boot with windows 10. I have tried to left unchanged all the partitions and to reduce slightly the size of my data partition only.

  1. With gparted, I resized the bigger data partition in order to have an overall size that fits the destination SSD, and moved all free space at the end
  2. I used clonezilla-Live from USB pen, with advanced mode and -icds enabled.

It failed. It looks like Clonezilla fails, at start, to clone the partition table to the destination disk because it wrongly uses sfdisk utility that is for older partition types instead of sgdisk utils. My solution:

  1. The same as previous (overall size must fit)

  2. I manually copied the partition from one drive to another, using Clonezilla shell with this command:

    sgdisk /dev/sdSourceDeviceName -R /dev/sdDestinationDeviceName

  3. Performed Clonezilla disc-to-disc clone, selecting the option -icds and the option to NOT CREATE a partition table on destination disk, option -k. (In this case Clonezilla uses the destination partitions as they are, and resizes partitions when sizes are smaller, in order to fit, it perform a good "best effort").

It worked. I obtained all the partitions the same size as source (Yes I only reduced the bigger partition a bit).

Why it worked The problem was with the automated procedure that is not able to clone&adapt the GPT table to the destination disc, the step 2 performs manually this step in the right way. Dual boot with windows keeps working well. Regards

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