If you're having issues booting into Rescuezilla, try selecting "graphical fallback mode" instead. Also make sure you restart out of Windows instead of shutting down if you're trying to clone or backup. Shutting down Windows can put it in a hibernation state and prevents it from being cloned.
You can also perform a full shutdown by pressing and holding the Shift key while clicking Shut down in the power options. Or even use "shutdown /s /f /t 0" in the command line.
Thank you so much for the video. We used Rescuezilla and BalenaEtcher to move our Windows 10 OS from a 512GB SSD to a larger 2TB SSD, and it worked a treat. No dramas, just followed your instructions! Really appreciated your efforts to make things clear and simple.
This video was really very helpful. I've always struggled with clonezilla's user interface and had no idea about rescuezilla. Thanks for the great video!!!
Thank you! Just successfully switched out my m.2 drive in the ol thinkpad. Rescuezilla froze on first attempt at 3%, tried it again with "rescue" checked and it cloned after 6 hours. Windows had no trouble booting up! I did run sfc /scannow after and it said there were some files it had to replace. One more thing for anyone attempting this, I couldn't extend the partition in rescuezilla because bitlocker had encrypted everything. Something you can turn off in windows beforehand! In my case I turned off bitlocker on the new drive and used a third party to move the recovery partition to the end. Then I used windows own tool to extend my c drive to the full 2tb. Good luck!
Hey! I want to thank you for your video, I just cloned Windows 11 from 500 G byte M.2 drive to 1 T byte M.2 drive, it was easy-peasy, now I got room for more games Hara!
I just cloned my hdd( Linux Mint 21.2) to a new 1TB ssd and everything worked as advertised...except resizing the partition afterwards. GParted (on the Rescuezilla USB) saw the unallocated space but would not resize the partition. Luckily, Disks was also on the Rescuezilla USB and that got the job done.
9:19 It should be noted that as imaging merely copies/compresses the utilized space of the main drive, the destination drive does not need to be larger than the source drive, but, need only be large enough to save the default compressed image afterward; I just imaged my 2 TB 990 Pro WIn10 install w/ 330 GB of used space onto a 250 GB image on a 1 TB external USB drive.
Just a tip. Starting your videos with a BLAST of noise is probably not the best idea. I'm sure you like it, but people don't usually watch these videos in bars. Often they watch videos at work or in places where they don't want to disturb others. Having a video come on with such a high volume of noise in such a situation is not helpful. All that being said, the content of your video was good. I wish you luck in the future of your channel.
Thanks for the comment. I try to make the intro a reasonable volume so that it's not louder than my voice, but if you're coming from another video that had low volume then I can see how it could disturb others. However if you're concerned about bothering others then using headphones would probably be a wise decision.
Very clear and informative, great job. This looks really good for free and open source software, but it is missing a vital (for me) feature that some of the free versions of commercial software have (for now, anyway), namely the ability to open the backup image and read or copy individual files.
Thanks! Rescuezilla is great for taking bootable backups of entire operating systems, so if your main SSD containing your OS ever dies then you can simply restore the backup to a new SSD and you'll be up and running again. Most other backup software where you can see the individual files don't take bootable backups. There might be some out there, but generally speaking, they're just meant for files and folders, not entire operating systems. Personally I do both types of backups. I use Rescuezilla for my main drive and other backup software for my important files on a daily schedule.
Man I remember having this iso until one of my hard drives broke, I forgot the name of it until today! Thank you for this! Wish I had this yesterday as I had to clone my Windows OS using Ubuntu instead due to early signs of a dying drive. On another note so confusing that Windows seems to have a worse experience with back ups stuff. You think paying for something that should exists as a free program would exists but it doesn't. Feels like I'm dealing with apple/android all over again.. Side note that intro peaked a bit too loud for my ears, even as someone who usually doesn't care about volume being too loud
Awesome contents. Rescuezilla is awesome. Thanks. I also Luv AOMEI. I got the pay version of AOMEI. Beside creating a backup image using AOMEI, it include backup files, sync, and many other great features.
Unfortunately my scenario was slightly different I'm actually downsizing from a 2tb HDD to 1tb SSD won't work. Debating whether to edit the partitions don't really want to risk messing up my data
Probably a stupid question but can I use this cloning method to copy files from on external hard drive to another? Seems like the generic copy feature takes a lot of time
Yes but it will copy the entire drive, including partitions. If you boot into your OS with both drives connected they might conflict with each other. It's probably not the best choice if you just want to transfer files.
Thanks much - well explained, demonstrated & very good tutor. Now can one clone a dual-boot disk having W11 + Linux MINT on it at the same process (e.g. one physical drive with EFi, NTFS & EXT4 partitions on it)? TIA TL
Thanks! That's a good question and I'm not 100% sure but if I had to guess I think it will work. Normally after its done cloning it will check for a bootloader and reinstall that if necessary. I don't see why it wouldn't be able to do that with two OSes. But I suggest testing it yourself to see if it works.
I am trying it now to close linux mint to a new build and drive, it seemed to work perfectly, I cloned my daily user to anexternal m2 drive via USB, 2 hours later I looked after it was done and could see the Desktop looked right, files all there, so I'm cloning it to th enew build now, hopefully in about 2 hours I can book that one up and see if the clone worked properly! EDIT: Looks like the cloning process worked perfectly!
Thanks! If the destination drive is smaller than the source drive then you'll need to resize the partition to a smaller size that can fit on the smaller drive before you do the cloning or backup. Then after cloning/restoring, make sure to expand the partition to fill the new drive.
@@PhazerTechI don't have the OS on my flash drive, I meant to say could I take the clone of my drive which I copied to my flash drive and then clone that onto the new 1TB SSD?
@@PhazerTechok I tried the method asked about and it cloned the drive to the flash drive but the after report says failed to resize partition 3 any idea what that means?
@@lancetheguywhogames Like I said, try the backup and restore options, not clone. You're not planning to boot from the USB drive so there's no point in using clone. And if you're running Windows then that can lead to problems since Windows can't run off a USB drive anyway.
When doing an image backup(not cloning), does the destination need to have enough space to hold the entire unused capacity of the source? For example, say you're backing up 32gb of data in a 512gb drive, does the destination need to have 512gb free or is 32gb sufficient(likely even less thanks to compression)?
In that case you would only need 32GB free, and yes it's likely less thanks to compression. BTW when restoring to a drive, that drive needs to have at least the same amount of space as the drive that was backed up. So in your example, at least 512GB. If you wanted to restore to a smaller drive, for example 256GB, you'll first need to shrink the partition on the original drive before backing it up.
Ive used the predecessor of this program, "Redo backup and restore", back in the day. It works, but it's not the fastest backup program. I wish someone could develop an open source program that could restore to dissimilar hardware, like what Acronis, which seems to have the monopoly, at the moment.
If it uses compression then the backup speed will depend on your hardware. Also I've been able to restore a Linux install to a different computer but it required GRUB to be manually reinstalled.
Thanks, fortunately there's a solution. Right click the desktop background and go to 'Display resolution and layout'. Then right click the active display and you can change the resolution to 1080p.
I've followed all the steps up to booting up from the new drive in the BIOs. I've changed the boot sequence to boot from the new larger drive but it always falls back and boots from my old drive (probably because the old one still has windows installed). How do I change this when I want to keep that old drive?
Some motherboards might be finicky. I would try removing the old drive and see if the new one boots. If it does then you can safely format the old drive if you'd like.
Will that little 1mb "unallocated" space left over (6:51) from gparted still remain in windows? That would drive me crazy. Also any issues doing this to clone from an ssd in a laptop temporarily to a drive in a USB enclosure?
Hey man, was wondering if you could share some insight on a issue i have, with that being said i bought a new m.2 ssd of 1Tb space i want to transfer all the data and softwares from my old ssd of 256gb space to new m.2 ssd but there is only one ssd slot in my laptop so please help me on how to clone my old ssd to new ssd without using usb enclosure??
You'll need an enclosure if you want to clone. The other option is to use any external hard drive and do a backup on it. Then swap the m.2 drives and restore the backup to the new drive.
I'm confused rescuezilla create bounch folders under main folder (backed up whole windows disk as image). If I'm correct clonezilla created one compresed image. Are interchangeable images clonezilla - rescuezilla?
That sounds like the normal behavior, it creates a folder. Clonezilla does the same. If I remember correctly, years ago I tried restoring a backup from Rescuezilla while using Clonezilla and it worked. Haven't tried the other way around though.
Yes they're the same thing but Rescuezilla is easier to use and has less features compared to clonezilla, but for most people it has everything they need. I recommend trying Rescuezilla first.
I am going to upgrade one of the HDDs in my computer, it's a secondary drive (not the C drive), and I use it for all of my online games. The reason for the upgrade is not because of performance, but capacity, I have a 2TB drive that I want to replace with a 6TB drive. With this software, can I clone my existing drive to the new drive, and use the new drive for gaming without having to reinstall anything??? Thanks in advance!!!!
Is it possible to clone 512GB nvme ssd my available space is 245 GB free unused to a 500GB HDD which is used as a backup to keep my backups saved so i dont lose anything in the future but i was gonna move it to my WD external hard drive that has 2TB which i also formatted as a backed up in gaming PC..... i purchased a new 2TB Samsung Pro 980 NVMe m.2 ssd but has to be installed and formatted so i can reclone the windows 11 OS to the new ssd ... Im just wondering if i could do this without buying a adapter to format the new ssd drive if any tips work let me know i appreciate and im a new follower im hoping guide can help me do this today
Here's what I recommend doing. You should do a backup, not a clone. If you do a backup you can save the drive as a file on one of your storage drives. Then you can restore that backup to any SSD you want, just make sure the new SSD is the exact same size or larger than the original SSD that was backed up. This way you won't need an adapter, you can just swap out the SSDs and then do the restore. Hope this helps.
I want to clone my Win 10 boot drive, I did a system recover not long ago and it added an extra Recovery Partition. Disk Management shows I have 2 healthy Recovery Partitions, 1 Healthy EFI Partition and C: on the boot drive. Recovery Partitions are 1 and 5, 5 is the active Recovery Partition according to reagentc /info. Would I be okay to not include the #1 partition? Edit: I (possibly) misunderstood the functionality of Rescuezilla, I thought cloning would create an ISO of my boot drive, and that I could use to load onto a new hard drive. If I'm wrong here, please let me know. If my last statement is true, I'm going to have to make a backup of my boot drive, remove current boot drive and replace with the new larger drive then restore the backup to that drive. When it shows the partitions being restored, will I be able to remove the #1 partition, if so, should I? Will this increase the possibility of error? Or should I remove it afterward with GPARTED?
In general I recommend including all partitions to save potential headache later. And to answer your second question, Rescuezilla doesn't create an ISO but creates its own format. The process you described is correct, you'll make a backup, replace the drive, then restore the backup to the new drive. If the new drive is larger you'll need to expand the main partition using GParted. Again, I don't recommend removing any partitions and I'm not sure if doing so would brick your OS or not.
Cool guide! I had a problem after following the steps, my new drive wouldn't boot and it was because somewhere the drive letters got messed (and C:/Windows became D:/Windows on the new drive). To fix I had to create a windows recovery USB, then on command prompt used this command: bcdboot.exe c:\windows worked like a charm after! Thanks for the video!
Could this have been because of the moving of partitions? or perhaps you had both disks connected when booting the new disk, and Windows still labeled the old one as C: and the new one as D: 🤔 I'm curious because this shouldn't happen.
@@AJ-po6up i think you got it, I tried to boot the new drive while the old one was still connected and windows messed up the assignments on the new one
hey man not sure If you know what I can do, but I've been following this guide, I made the bootable usb with ventoy and everything. The problem is the laptops hdd is partitioned and It is larger than the ssd I am trying to clone to. I have a 500gb ssd and I'm trying to clone the contents of a 1tb drive but everything in the drive totals to around 100gb. Is it possible for me to still use rescuezilla? I'm getting an error that refers to the partitions in the main drive. If anyone here has an answer I would greatly appreciate it. I tried using gparted but I'm not sure where to start lmao
Hey dude, it sounds like you'll first need to shrink the main partition on the original drive using gparted before trying to clone it. I showed how to use gparted to expand a drive, so you'll follow the same steps except you'll shrink it instead of expanding.
@@PhazerTech dude thank you so much! :) I had a hard suspicion that you would know how to solve this problem haha thanks man! I hope you had a great weekend!
Hey man, was wondering if you could share some insight on a issue i have, with that being said my main drive c: a ssd is some what got bad sectors i really dont want to reinstall i have a spare ssd same size will this software clone my main ssd as the others and failed also chkdsk fails even hdd regenerator... please help & thank you in advanced
It's hard to say. If your drive has bad sectors then it might be possible to clone it if you check the "rescue" option that I mentioned in the video, but there's no guarantees. The same goes for any recovery software. You might need to install a fresh OS unfortunately. That's why it's important to always keep backups of your important data. Best of luck.
@@PhazerTech it didnt work but thanks for the help, what i ended up doing is using robocopy command to copy the important files, now for a fresh install of windows i will try and format that ssd check if bad sectors still on it if so then its going out the window
Hi, I can’t seem to expand the partition in the GParted step. I suspect this is because the partition is a BitLocker file system. Is there anyway I can bypass it?
Bitlocker needs to be disabled ahead of time for imaging/cloning to work on Linux systems, and likewise, 'secure boot' disabled in BIOS to boot Rescuezilla.....@@PhazerTech
So question: When backing up to an image, if say your source Drive is 512gb in capacity, but there is only 50gb of content on it. Will the resulting backup image be 512gb or 50gb?
It will actually be a bit less than 50GB since it uses compression. However if you wanted to restore the image to a drive, the destination drive needs to be at least 512GB, unless you shrink the partition first before you back it up.
@@PhazerTechHey thanks for the quick response. So you mean I would have to shrink the partition on the image first, before restoring it to a drive smaller than 512GB, correct? With what tool would I be able to shrink the image partition? I’m familiar with shrinking hard drive partitions but not image partitions... Thanks for the help!
@@teegees Sure thing. Actually you would need to shrink it before you make the backup, only if you plan to restore to a driver smaller than 512GB. You can use gparted to resize partitions like I showed in the video.
I'm on Linux Mint and noticed after downloading Rescuzilla when I right click on the .iso file I can create a bootable USB drive from Linux. Linux RULES!!!!!
going through the steps to clone in the video and finished 100%, but after it says re-installing GRUB bootloader (if any) and has been on that screen for more than a couple hours now and not sure if I should just try and exit out and continue or wait it out. I will wait a couple more hours but it might just be hanging. any feedback is greatly appreciated
Sounds like it might have hung up for some reason so it should be okay to exit. If the drive doesn't boot then you can repair GRUB with a live USB of your distro.
@PhazerTech thank you for the reply. I exited out and tried to go to the next step to partition with Gparted but it doesn't even open up. Maybe I should try and go through the process and try and clone again? I got a srttrail.txt on my windows ssd drive and it is now write protected so i'm trying to clone it and fix it with rescuezilla. When I did the step 6 cloning disk, I got a popup window saying failed to run command: ntfsfix --clear-dirty /dev/nvme0n1p1 among a few other windows like this. can I ignore these and still clone? Much appreciated for all the help. 😊
@@DrumInfected Yes I'd try to clone again. Also I didn't realize you were running Windows, I assumed it was Linux because you mentioned GRUB. If you're still having issues I'd try using a live Windows USB and using the repair tool. Also see this article for more help: www.auslogics.com/en/articles/fix-srttrail-txt-bsod-error-win10/
@@PhazerTech I tried to clone again and it hung up at the same part. thanks but I already made a windows USB repair tool since I can't get to OS and needed it to get to command prompt to try and fix the issue but not luck. That's why I was trying to perhaps clone the faulty drive with the srtTrail.txt log file and then try and fix it after it was clone, since I don't get the write protection errors anymore and could that route.
I took the external ssd I cloned and looked at it on another computer and it looks like everything was cloned, so I think i will try and put in PC and see if it fixed the srttrail.txt issue.
It should work if you first shrink the partition on the 1TB drive to something that can fit in the 512GB drive, then do a backup/restore instead of a clone. I've successfully done this with a Linux distro, but your mileage may vary.
Cloning to a smaller drive will not work , which copies the entire drive, empty/unused space and all...; you can, however, image to a smaller drive as long as the compressed image fits onto the free space of the smaller drive..@@PhazerTech
Do a backup/restore instead of cloning. I've successfully cloned a drive with Linux to a smaller one before with this method. And yes you need to shrink the partition first.
@@PhazerTech I tried both methods with the same result unfortunately. The image was only 160gb and the destination ssd was 223gb useable. I received the same error.
@@PhazerTech It can boot from an external SSD drive. There's literally a video here on RU-vid where the Windows 10 iso gets flashed to an external SSD, loaded via the boot menu, and installed onto the external SSD. It's called "How to Install Windows 10 or 11 on an External USB Drive / Step by Step"
@@Kyouma. Sorry I meant to say you can't install Windows to an external drive, at least not officially. Go ahead and try it yourself, the installer will complain saying Windows can't install to an external drive. It looks like you're correct that it is possible with work-arounds, but like I said it's not officially supported.
OK, I'll try by best to be respective here. Seriously, not a joke. And here it is: IMO, why dilly dally around with a primitive software such as rescuezilla when there is Macrium out there which really shines ! I tried it; it's crude and it sucks !
Did you restart out of Windows or shutdown? If you shutdown it might be in a hibernated state which prevents you from modifying it. See this thread about a similar issue: sourceforge.net/p/rescuezilla/discussion/support/thread/726156286e/
This one is soooo mutch better than clonezilla, i literally love it. Thats awesome software! ❤❤❤ Also just wanna say that the biggest factor to how fast one backup will be created is how fast your hard drive is. For example backup between my two ssds takes 4 minutes. But backup from ssd to hdd takes 30 minutes on the same pc
