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My 500GB hard drive reported a failure to Windows (I have Windows 7) and I want to clone this drive to a good 1TB drive before the 500GB drive stops working. I have been reading the manuals on how to use Clonezilla to do a disk-to-disk copy, but one thing I haven't seen specifically is what preparation the target HDD needs to have done to it before using Clonezilla.

Do I need to format the 1TB drive or will Clonezilla do that? (I suspect the answer is probably Yes format before running Clonzezilla but I wanted to make sure)

If I format it using my current Windows 7 before using Clonezilla, do I need to check the "make bootable" checkbox when using the Windows format utility, or will Clonezilla take care of making the target drive bootable?

mring
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    You shouldn't have to do anything. Clonezilla will do all the work. – Ramhound Sep 10 '14 at 18:35
  • You write "Do I need to format the 1TB drive or will Clonezilla do that? " <-- I don't think you understand what a clone or image is. It's beyond formatting. Maybe you should study philosophy. If the source drive is formatted, and you clone it, then the dest drive will be formatted. If a drive has 3 partitions and every bit is copied from that drive to another drive, then the other drive will have 3 partitions. If you want to do something on teh target, you could run chkdsk on it – barlop Sep 11 '14 at 00:31
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    @barlop Not all backup/restore tools actually clone the DRIVE, some just clone the DATA, and therefore may need pre-formatted drives. The OP hasn't used Clonezilla before so it's a good question. Especially since Clonezilla is one of those unclear applications regarding term "exact-copy". For example with Linux installations it will sometimes re-install GRUB to the MBR rather than clone it. – Robin Hood Sep 11 '14 at 00:39
  • @RobinHood - Just used Clonezilla and I think I recall seeing that it reinstalls GRUB by default, and you have to uncheck the box to avoid it. – Hashim Aziz Nov 25 '17 at 02:48

1 Answers1

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Clonezilla

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No, the destination drive doesn't need to have a partition table, partitions, or filesystem applied. Only the source needs to.

Robin Hood
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