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I've attempted to clone a HDD to a SSD using dd using the following command

sudo dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdc bs=32M status=progress

as per this page. (I used sudo because it didn't give me permission to read from sda otherwise)

The goal was to uplift the HDD to SSD, it's an old Compaq CQ58 with the original HDD 128GB the disk size I was migrating to was a Samsung Evo 970 500GB SSD.

The dd command seemingly transferred without error and therefore i assumed it transferred fine (unfortunately I no longer have the output, it was running from a USB "Live" disk). On attempting to boot the laptop using the newly cloned disk, I get a Windows BSOD saying something went wrong. Weirdly I get the same BSOD on the original disk, so now neither boot.

sda had two partitions under it: /dev/sda1 and /dev/sda2. On gparted the partitions and size "look" about right, however I get the following error now when I open gparted now.

The driver descriptor says the physical block size is 2048 bytes, but linux says its 512 bytes.

I'm not entirely sure what to do next. I was hoping anything I'd try wouldn't affect the original disk but it has.

I should also specify the OS of the old laptop is Windows 8 (I don't currently have the brain capacity to go full Windows 10/11 and reinstall all the users software so wanted to lift and shift for a bit more speed at least temporarily).

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  • "Weirdly I get the same BSOD on the original disk, so now neither boot" - that sounds like a flag's got changed in the BIOS somewhere that identifies HDD vs SSD, or chooses UEFI vs old style. What's the error message and code in the BSOD? Are they the same for HDD and SSD disks? Does Windows 8 even support SSDs? Commented Oct 12, 2024 at 9:53
  • Are both disks connected when you try to boot? If you cloned them, it might be confused which disk it is booting from because they now have the same IDs. Commented Oct 12, 2024 at 14:06
  • I didnt catch the BSOD code the first time (it did a instant reboot) and i stupidly didnt get it the next time either on the next disk, i think now it goes to a windows error screen which only lets me reboot. Currently ive made a win10 usb and using the cmd prompt to do a chkdsk (following a guide), seeing if i can repair via that. Only 1 disk is plugged in at one time. Win 8 does support ssds from googling, so i hoped it'd be fine. Commented Oct 12, 2024 at 14:23
  • I get a flash of "INACCESSIBLE BOOT DEVICE" on restarting , chkdsk also finished fine with some logs. Commented Oct 12, 2024 at 14:42
  • My SSD is 512/512 and HDD is "Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/4096B " Not sure how you got 2048. dd is really intended for same size to same size/configuration drives. Do not know best tool for Windows but with Linux better to do new install to SSD & restore your data from you normal backup. Using dd to larger gpt drives puts backup gpt partition table in middle of drive, gdisk can correct that, but not sure what other issues a dd causes. rodsbooks.com/gdisk/repairing.html Commented Oct 12, 2024 at 15:57

1 Answer 1

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I have a part solution, to my problem.

I managed to get the original disk back up and running which was on windows 8 I followed this youtube video which is very thorough

Tldw; It tells you to go into recovery tools for windows and into command prompt, tells you to first make a backup of the registry files and after that replace them with the files backed up by windows on it's last working version.

This got my original disk booting up at least, will try to find another software to clone the disk now instead of dd.

Edit2: I used a clonezilla live disk, it cloned smoothly without issue. Gut feeling is that windows 8 didnt shutdown properly when i did the attempted to clone using the dd command, which made the original malfunction. For the target disk, since I used dd and cloned the partition table to a bigger disk, it possibly got very confused.

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