4 Free Drive Cloning Applications for Windows and Linux

Upgrading the storage drive in your Windows PC is one of the best ways to improve performance and capacity. However, if you decided to replace your primary drive, then the biggest challenge is to restore operating system, drivers, and other applications. Reinstalling Windows and applications from scratch on the new drive can be a frustrating and time-consuming process.

Fortunately, there is an easier solution – drive cloning software. Free drive cloning applications allow you to make an exact copy of your existing drive and replicate it onto a new drive. The key benefit is that you don’t have to reinstall the operating system, drivers, programs, or reconfigure settings. Everything is cloned over seamlessly. All you have to do is swap in the new cloned drive and boot up your system.

Drive cloning tools work by copying the contents of the old drive sector-by-sector to the new drive. This includes the master boot record, partitions, operating system, applications, and all user data. Essentially a byte-for-byte duplicate.

Well, if you are into digital forensics, drive cloning applications are one of the most likely used applications. These drive cloning software allows forensic analyst to take the exact copy of digital media for further forensic analysis.

We published this blog post to help those who want to clone their old drive to a new drive. In this post, we will cover 4 excellent free drive cloning solutions for Windows: Samsung Data Migration, DiskGenius, Clonezilla Live, and DD for Linux. Read on to find the best option to quickly and easily migrate or upgrade your Windows drive.

Samsung Data Migration Software

Samsung Data Migration is a straightforward and reliable free cloning application from Samsung. As the largest SSD manufacturer, many people already use Samsung drives, making this a popular choice. 

Samsung Data Migration is a free to download software, so no registration, or details is required to download it. However, this option is only for Windows users and it can only be used to clone Samsung SSDs.

The reason we kept this on the top because of its simple and easy to use interface. You select the source drive to clone on the left side, which will always be your current Windows system drive. On the right side, you choose the target Samsung SSD drive to clone to 2 additional partitions or volumes if desired.

Once you select the source and target drives, simply click the Start button at the bottom. Samsung Data Migration will then clone all your selected partitions from the old drive to the new drive.

A pop-up dialog will warn that your computer will automatically shut down after the cloning is complete. This is for safety so you can disconnect the old drive before booting up again.

A status bar at the bottom shows the progress during the cloning operation. Depending on drive size, it may take 10 minutes to an hour or more. A key limitation is that you can only clone up to 3 volumes/partitions in the free version. Still, for basic system drive cloning, it does the job excellently. The simplicity and reliability make it a great choice for Samsung SSD owners.

DiskGenius

DiskGenius is a more fully featured disk cloning utility that works with any drive brand. Again, there is a simple free download with no registration needed.

The interface provides more detailed drive information, showing all the partitions including hidden recovery partitions. This extra detail is useful when cloning a system drive, as it automatically includes the important hidden partitions for booting Windows.

In the main interface, you can see all your drives and partitions listed. Select the drive then click the “Tools > Clone Disk” button to launch the clone tool.

Unlike Samsung Data Migration, you can manually select any additional partitions or volumes you want to clone, in addition to the boot drive. This gives you flexibility if you have data drives you also want to migrate.

When the source and target drives are selected, you can allocate space on the new drive if it is larger capacity than the old drive. This allows your partitions to make full use of the additional space.

One amazing feature that most users love is its “hot migration” cloning. DiskGenius allows you to clone a live system drive while Windows is still running! No need to boot into a separate environment.

There are extensive options to control the cloning process and handle any potential issues like bad sectors. Overall, DiskGenius strikes a great balance between power and ease-of-use for free drive cloning software.

Clonezilla Live

Clonezilla Live takes a slightly different approach, booting from a USB drive into a Linux environment. This allows you to clone drives even if Windows is corrupted or unbootable.

Clonezilla distribute the software in the form of an ISO file. You can download it from SourceForge. You’ll need to write this to a USB stick to create the bootable Clonezilla Live drive. You can use any ISO burning software to write to a USB drive. Etcher is a great free, cross-platform tool for burning ISOs to USB.

On booting into Clonezilla, you simply choose the source drive and target drive from the list shown. It automatically detects all drives connected to your system.

Next, you can select options like proportional resizing of partitions to fit the full capacity of a larger target drive.

Finally, choose to reboot or shutdown after cloning completes. Then Clonezilla will fully clone all partitions and data from the source to target drive.

Being Linux-based, Clonezilla works on any computer. The bootable USB aspect also makes it handy for cloning drives in different machines without needing to install software on each one.

The ability to copy an entire drive when Windows is unbootable can be a lifesaver for recovering a damaged system. However, the basic text-based interface may be less user-friendly for some.

DD for Linux

Linux users can use the DD command to clone drives. DD stands for “data duplicator” and copies drives sector-by-sector.

For example:

dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb status=progress

This clones everything from drive sda to drive sdb and displays progress.

However, DD isn’t smart like the other tools. It copies all sectors, even empty space. It also won’t auto-resize partitions to fit the target drive capacity.

So for proper system drive cloning under Linux, a tool like Clonezilla is better as it copies only used space and resizes partitions. DD is better suited for creating exact block-level clones of drives where needed.

Bottom Line

Upgrading a drive or creating a clone for forensic analysis. Free drive cloning software makes it easy to duplicate your system to the new drive without reinstalling everything. For basic Windows drive cloning, Samsung Data Migration and DiskGenius are excellent free options. Clonezilla Live adds flexibility for more advanced scenarios. DD command line utility is a simple option without advanced features.

Give one of these free drive cloning applications a try for your next Windows drive upgrade or migration. Your cloned drive will be up and running again in no time!

With the right tools, drive cloning can save you hours of reinstalling and configuring your system. Next time your boot drive is getting full, consider using free cloning software for a quick and painless upgrade.

We hope this post lets you know the different options to clone drive. If this post interesting to you. Visit our website, thesecmaster.com, and social media pages on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Telegram, Tumblr, & Medium and subscribe to receive updates like this.