Macrium Reflect question.

APM · 10 Feb 2018 at 17:07

If I'm working in Windows on a dual boot Windows/Linux machine and I clone the Linux drive/partitions will I then have a bootable Linux distro on the cloned drive?

What if I just place a drive with a linux distro on it physically mounted in a windows pc,connected to sata and power,could I clone that?

Thanks.

APM · 11 Feb 2018 at 08:09

No-one tried anything like this then?

APM · 13 Feb 2018 at 15:00

I'm going to have a run at it on the weekend and see what happens.

I would think that in the first instance you may need to run a repair from an install disk to get it going too.

APM · 14 Feb 2018 at 17:03

I have a hard drive dock that does cloning with the proviso that the target drive is larger than the source drive.

That can be a pita but I used it to clone the Fedora install that I'm running here from the original 500GB drive to a 1 TB drive,now I would like to re-purpose the 500GB drive but I'd also like a spare clone to have in a drawer that I could just swop in if issues arise in the future so I'm going to see how small a clone I can get.

I use that machine for some cctv though so may have to do some partitioning and storage changes to just capture the system.

Only ran one Windows clone so far and that shrunk the system to fit the target drive which is much much more useful imho.

APM · 13 Mar 2018 at 12:21

Finally got around to doing this.
Booted the dual boot machine into Windows.
Ran Macrium Reflect,made a clone of the Windows install,55GB install cloned to 50GB in 30 minutes.
Cloned the other drive with the Fedora install on it,that cloned about 350GB and took 6 plus hours.

Not had time to install the cloned drives and see if anything will actually work yet but I'd bet the Windows install will boot with no issues.

APM · 13 Mar 2018 at 16:54

Macrium showed 3 partitions on the linux drive from inside Windows,if booted into linux there are 4 or 5 partitions on it.

I cloned the first 2 linux partitions as I know the 3rd is only storage,only thing is the 2nd partition was described as unformatted partition so I don't know how it'll pan out.

I will stick the drive in a machine and see if it boots though and report back when I've done that.