I bought a laptop with windows 11 instaled in its 256gb nmve ssd. I want to install linux but I want to first create an image of the ssd and store it in an external 4tb ssd with a ext4 filesystem (that I use for different backups) so in case I want to sell the laptop later I can restore windows 11 to the same ssd from the image. So what i’m planning to do is:
- dd if=/dev/drive_device of=external_ssd/images/windows11.img
for creating the image and swapping if and of for restoring. My question is if creating the image of a drive with a windows 11 filesystem and storing it in a ext4 filesystem is possible or can have any issue. I ask this because I read that in the case of cloning the target drive will end up with the filesystem of the source drive in case they are different, which caused me some hesitation.
The file you create using the
ddcommand is just a file. It can live on any filesystem capable of storing a 256 GB file.Make sure that you compare the checksum between the drive and the file and store a copy of it with the file, so you can check it after restoring the data.
Note that you can even mount that file using a loopback interface, so you can read the content, but if you alter it, the checksum will change.
Welcome to Linux where all manner of magic is built-in.
Great, I didn’t know that you can make a checksum of a drive. Thanks.
It’s possible because block devices can be read just like files (except often the permission differences)
you can use the sha256sum command to do this. there are a few siblings of it with different algs. gui tools also existof course
Pretty much everything on Linux is a “file”, which is a metaphor used throughout the operating system.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everything_is_a_file