Clonezilla and Windows 7

I manage the computers at our local library, and unfortunately, most of these run Windows – Windows 7, to be specific. This operating system can be terribly slow at times, on our slightly old desktop computers that use hard disks instead of SSDs. When booting, it often takes Windows a minute or two have a fully working desktop, and you have to watch a spinning hourglass during that time. Also, when Windows puts itself to sleep after some idle time, the wake-up process is so slow and disk-intensive that you might as well go to lunch while waiting for it.

The big bottleneck here appears to be disk I/O. So I decided we needed to upgrade the main computer with an SSD. This computer boots Windows 7 by default, but it also has a Linux partition that can be selected at boot time. The plan was to use Clonezilla to copy the old hard disk to the SSD. The SSD would be placed in a USB external drive enclosure during the clone operation, then swapped with the hard disk inside the computer.

Clonezilla was easy enough to install on a USB thumb drive. I downloaded the ISO file, then used the “USB Image Writer” application in Linux Mint to copy the ISO onto the thumb drive. I booted the computer from the thumb drive, and when Clonezilla reached its first prompt, I plugged in the SSD (which was now in the USB external enclosure). I told Clonezilla to do a partition/disk to partition/disk copy.

But then I made a big mistake. I told Clonezilla to proportionally resize the partitions on the SSD. I thought this would be useful, since the SSD was twice as big as the original hard disk. But the result was that Windows would not boot, though the Linux partition did boot correctly.

The fix was to run Clonezilla again, but this time let it copy the old partition table to the SSD, without proportionally resizing the partitions. This allowed Windows to boot properly. At some point, I’ll use gparted to increase the partition sizes for both Windows and Linux.