The method I have used with almost 100% success is using a great bit of free software called Clonezilla You can download an iso, burn it to a USB and boot your computer/laptop with it without having to install it and lose data. By not losing data, I assume that you have taken all due care to read everything at least twice, so you aren’t cloning the empty disk to one you have data on of course, and have some sort of backup if possible of data that means a lot to you. Yep that’s a disclaimer of sorts!

The software

Per above, Clonezilla. Bootable USB or CD. All the info is on their webpage on how to make the bootable USB – https://clonezilla.org/clonezilla-live.php

Depending on the age of your hardware you’re using to host Clonezilla, you may need to choose the uEFI version, or the Legacy boot. If your computer is newer than about 4-5 years, chances are it’s eUFI but may have to check your BIOS on seeing if it has a secure boot option. if you’re running Windows 10 or 11, safe to say yours is eUFI. At worst if it doesn’t boot with the first, try the second.. 

I personally use Rufus to write the image using Windows. https://rufus.ie/

The Steps

1) Boot your PC or laptop with the USB we created earlier.

First screen – select to RAM. This allows us to pull out the USB stick to free up a port if necessary, and also make sure we don’t overwrite the USB stick in error, or clone that to our new disk.

Second, we want to choose expert mode. No fun in being a beginner!!

We want to work straight from a source physical disk to a destination physical disk, not images. (Can do this another day)

Now – this is the part that needs your full attention. Read that again.. This is choosing your source disk. This is the one you want to copy from. Clonezilla isn’t smart enough to safeguard you from selecting your blank, new shiny SSD here and cloning that to your one and only surviving disk and if you don’t read everything and are 1,000,000% right in checking serial, model type so you get the right one, you’re opening up yourself to weeks of depression..

having said that – you may be fortunate enough to have two different brands, or models and this is quite straightforward. But here in my example, you can see both are Seagate SSD’s and quite similar. Check the serial numbers on the label and then have a second person if possible check it again. If you’re totally lost then pull out one drive from the USB port and isolate which one is which that way.. I reiterate.. IF YOU DON”T PAY ATTENTION HERE, THEN BE WARNED!

Once we are part the right source drive, we choose a destination drive. This is a good chance to check the serial on the destination drive as a final validity check before proceeding. Read that top line.. “All data on the entire disk will be lost and replaced” (you’ve been warned!)

Once our source and destination have been carefully chosen, we then get the next important screen. The options we want are the top five, and personally I also tick the bottom two. This will give me full output as it goes along and then a nice little trumpet sound when done.

• -g – Reinstall Grub
• -e1 auto – automatically adjust filesystem
• -e2 – uses the CHS of hard drive from EDD
• -j2 – Clone Hidden Data
• -r – resize the filesystem (important if you are going from a 750gb to a 1tb for example to get the extra space)

** on one occasion I had to use -q1 to clone a drive that was spitting errors and failing a quarter of the way through. This took 5 hours, compared to about half an hour typically but gave me a full working copy. 

Once selected then choose -sfsck to skip any checks of the filesystem as we are cloning.

After this we are just about done! We will get a screen that gets us to confirm all the settings are correct and we are entirely sure of the disk we are about to wipe, and progress bars..

Recovering Data