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.
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.
I used to do this frequently “back in the day”…
dd will create a complete bit-for-bit copy of the drive and put its contents into a file. All the way down to the boot sector, partitions, etc. Filesystem doesn’t even matter a little.
I used to do something like “dd /dev/sda bs=1M | nc remote.server 1234” and then on the remote server “nc -l 1234 -p > file.img </dev/null”. I was swapping back and forth between Linux and Windows on a work laptop that I was using for non-work related things on the weekend, at conferences, etc.
Wasn’t perhaps my most intelligent moment, but it worked!