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.
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!