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.

  • lemmyreader
    link
    fedilink
    English
    818 hours ago

    Apart from dd you can also go for Clonezilla or Rescuezilla. Both not super user friendly but once you get familiar with it makes backups and restore easy and fast for data and boot-loader.