How to make an image of Windows 10/11 with clonezilla under Linux

  • Prepare Windows installation. Open up a command prompt with Administrator privileges by Win+X then launching terminal (admin) Then run cmd inside to use command prompt Then type “powercfg -h off”, this will disable hibernate Then disable fast boot Then shut down PC

  • Then pull out drive and insert in to your working Linux machine

  • Mount “/home/partimag” on to a suitable spare drive with free space, using sda1 as an example, by typing: sudo mount /dev/sda1 /home/partimag

  • Confirm that drive is mounted and has sufficient space for the image, then do a listing to see what else is on that drive (optional) cd /home/partimag df -h . ls -la

  • Open your favourite terminal emulator (I use Alacritty)

  • Install/open clonezilla

  • Choose device-image mode

  • Choose skip (use existing /home/partimag)

  • Verify in terminal that correct target partition is selected

  • Choosing Beginner mode is usually fine

  • Choose savedisk to create an image of the whole disk, which I would recommend (or saveparts to save individual partitions)

  • Choose a name for the image

  • Choose your local source disk that you wish to capture the image of (existing disk to be imaged)

  • Skip fsck to skip filechecking of existing disk

  • Select yes, check saved image file for errors

  • Choose senc to skip encryption (recommended unless you need encryption of your image)

  • Choose to reboot/shutdown (this will not do anything once clonezilla exits back to terminal)

  • Choose y to confirm changes listed in your terminal

  • Sit back and watch your drive image be created.

  • If you receive the error listed below or similar, then you need to re-insert the Windows drive back in to the computer and boot in to Windows and open an Admin command-prompt (as described in step 1) and then run “chkdsk /f” which will then ask to perform a check disk upon reboot, do this and then allow it to run. Once this is done, you need to “restart” Windows, then press your power button (or pull the plug) on your computer when the screen goes black. Once this is done, you should be able to re-insert the drive in to your Linux machine and re-run clonezilla. ntfsclone-ng.c: NTFS Volume ‘/dev/sdb3’ is scheduled for a check or it was shutdown uncleanly. Please boot Windows or fix it by fsck.