nerdy footnote: the main problem I've been having with cloning these days is that whereas in the windows XP era, one could just clone the C drive, mark it active, and things would work, nowadays Windows creates two partitions for itself, both of which are required to boot, and with GPT partition schemes and so on, making a system bootable even if you copy all the partitions is no longer so simple.
My workaround, since clonezilla would not clone the entire disk if the new disk was smaller, was to install windows on the new disk, then clone the old C drive to the new disk in place of the freshly installed C. But that solution doesn't work well with Windows 10 because of all the different versions (builds) of Windows 10 - the data on the two partitions needs to be from the same build. Microsoft's download tools only let you access the latest build, and that works if the laptop is fully up to date, but it won't always be so, and so on. And there might be additional hijinks going on that I don't yet grok. Any which way, my workaround is fine for windows 7, but fails for windows 10.
(Insert tiny rant here about how MS's greatest deepest wish is to become just like Apple in every way, even if Apple's way of doing things is wrong, and thus you cannot get an older version of Windows from their download tool if you need one)
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My workaround, since clonezilla would not clone the entire disk if the new disk was smaller, was to install windows on the new disk, then clone the old C drive to the new disk in place of the freshly installed C. But that solution doesn't work well with Windows 10 because of all the different versions (builds) of Windows 10 - the data on the two partitions needs to be from the same build. Microsoft's download tools only let you access the latest build, and that works if the laptop is fully up to date, but it won't always be so, and so on. And there might be additional hijinks going on that I don't yet grok. Any which way, my workaround is fine for windows 7, but fails for windows 10.
(Insert tiny rant here about how MS's greatest deepest wish is to become just like Apple in every way, even if Apple's way of doing things is wrong, and thus you cannot get an older version of Windows from their download tool if you need one)