My experience cloning Windows 10

Introduction

I bought an SSD to replace classic slow HDD on home M$ Windows 10 machine. This SSD is a smaller than the original HDD (250 GB vs 500 GB) so I could not clone whole disk which I hope would be easier (anyway I will probably never know).

Initial research

Before I started I decided to check internet (DuckDuckGo) and asked how to migrate M$ Windows 10 from HDD to SSD. Sadly all I got and wasted time on were articles advertising commercial product (or features of commercial version) as free product and nothing constructive which would help me. (Such a costly system and it does not even has a migration tool.)

My second thought was to use CloneZilla as it is great tool for cloning driver in general.

Cloning

Before starting I prepared partitions on SSD in the same way as they were on the original drive apart from the one for data.

I cloned all partitions one by one, started M$ Windows rescue medium (or something of that sort) to fix the bootloader (which worked after few tries) and was happy to get to M$ Windows loading screen but than I got only blackscreen with working mouse cursor (my thoughts at the time were as follow: wtf? You can find the cursor so show me the rest!). So I searched how to fix this (maybe error during cloning, or some M$ Windows thing) but nothing helped solve my problem.

Solution

I ran out of patiance for this crazy product and downloaded installation media from the website, “burn” it on USB and installed new “clean” system on SSD. After doing so I had to code the data and install programs and set few things (it is not very customized machine). This also took a while.

Conclusion

It is probably me who was unable to find the “right” manual for migration and also me who does not understand the essence of M$ Windows.

Final thought

Commercial products suck.

Articles from blogs I follow:

Why is your open source project still hosted on GitHub?

Perhaps the younger generation don't know anything about the past "evils" of Microsoft and naively believe that Microsoft is now the good friend to open source, but the truth is that all Microsoft acquisitions of open source projects is a busi…

via unixdigest.com May 22, 2025

StarFive VisionFive v2 and FreeBSD

This week I powered up the StarFive VisionFive v2 board that I have. I figured I would give FreeBSD another whirl on it, in the vague hope that RISC-V boards are a more cohesive family than ARM boards were five years ago. tl;dr: I didn’t get it to work as…

via [bobulate] May 20, 2025

Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

There's a common narrative that Microsoft was moribund under Steve Ballmer and then later saved by the miraculous leadership of Satya Nadella. This is the dominant narrative in every online discussion about the topic I've seen and it's a commo…

via danluu.com October 28, 2024

Generated by openring