So, I need to dual boot my computer into windows. I have been using only zorin for a while but now I need to dual boot for school. I purchased a new drive, so I don’t have to partition my current drive but it is larger than my current drive. Is there an easy way to move zorin onto the new drive and have windows on my current one? Or will I just have to flash zorin onto the new one and then reimage windows onto my current one?
boot any distro from a USB
dd if=/dev/(SMALL DISK) of=/dev/(BIG DISK) status=progressDo not target partitions, ie /dev/sda1, but target the disk itself, so all partitions are copied over, ie /dev/sda
wait for it to finish
use any partitioning tool to expand the Zorin partition to fill out the remaining space. I like to use gparted.
Fuck cloning software, just do it yourself. It’s easier.
Just wanted to say, sometimes it’s easier having two drives. If you have an extra slot I would do that. You could try vm too. I prefer KVM, but virtualbox is fine and easier.
Like others said dd should work.
If for whatever reason you prefer cloning software I’m pretty sure Clonezilla will easily do a disk-to-disk clone, just double-check if you still need to expand the partition on the new drive after cloning (I don’t remember if Clonezilla does that for you).
Clonezilla is great, and simplifies the use of dd
can’t run windows in a vm?
I haven’t had any success doing that at the very least. I’m sure I could make it work but I need it for programming in visual studio and I might as well just have a dedicated drive.
That can be had in Linux too.My bad, I’m new to all this.
Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code are not the same thing
Kind of like how outlook and outlook aren’t the same thing, and copilot and copilot and copilot 365 aren’t the same?
Visual studio and visual studio code are two different things.
Use
dd! It’s a tool that allows you to copy the contents of anything bit-for-bit to anywhere else. First, you’ll need to boot into a live USB of any distro. Then, after plugging in both drives, you’ll want to run something likedd if=/path/to/source/drive of=/path/to/output/drive bs=4M. You can get the paths of each drive by runninglsblk, and they’ll look something like/dev/sda1or/dev/nvme0n1. (Be very careful withdd, as whatever you put as the output drive will be irreversibly overwritten with whatever you put the input drive as.)What you want is cloning software. You can use proprietary software like Acronis. I have used it for years but it costs.
Or you can choose free software like Clonezilla that you will flash and then boot into on a computer with the old drive and the new drive attached via an adapter. I don’t think it works if the drive is in the computer. Last time I did this a month ago, it didn’t detect the internal drive, only the drives we had attached via USB adapters.
You’ll be able to clone the old drive to the new one and even customize if you want the sizing to remain the same, relatively speaking, or let it consume the new drive naturally, which I prefer.
Once you do that, then you can move on to doing dual boot.
Be careful doing it this way though. Because dual booting by installing Windows after Linux usually requires you to reconfigure your Linux bootloader (GRUB, systemd, etc.) because Windows will override it with its own bootloader that doesn’t recognize any other OS. It’s not impossible, just annoying so most people opt to install Windows then install Linux for dual booting in that order. If you can, you might choose to install Windows on the new drive and then install Zorin afterwards and then bring over your old files and settings after the fact. That might be an easier method here than cloning.
