How to restore a disk image with Clonezilla (2024)

Published by JP Novak on April 5, 2024 and last updated on April 11, 2024

This page is part of a tutorial that describes how to clone the contents of an M.2 SSD drive to another SSD when the computer motherboard has a single M.2 slot.

We saw earlier how to create an image of the original SSD with Clonezilla, then how to replace the existing M.2 SSD with a new one. Now we will see how to restore the image of the old SSD to the new one.

Please note that restoring the disk image will delete the contents of the destination disk. If you feel unsure about reproducing the steps, ask someone with good computer skills to help you. As always, the author and the website decline any responsibilities about the consequences of trying to reproduce these steps.

I turned on the PC and I accessed the motherboard’s Boot Manager to boot with the Sandisk USB disk with Clonezilla. As you can see in the following screenshot, the new M.2 SSD also appeared in the list as “CT1000P3SSD8” which meant that it had been recognized correctly by the motherboard.

Clonezilla menu appeared and I chose the first entry in the list to load the “Clonezilla live” version with VGA resolution.

The language menu appeared and I chose the English language, so that the screenshots in this tutorial could be understood by as many people as possible.

The next menu was about the keyboard layout configuration, I kept the default one “American English” then clicked the “OK” button.

Then I selected the “Start_Clonezilla” option and I clicked the “OK” button to start Clonezilla.

I had previously backed up the contents of the old M.2 SSD in a Clonezilla image, so I chose the “device-image” mode so I could restore that image to the new drive.

I then chose the “local_dev” option because the image to restore was on a local disk of the computer.

I had saved the original M.2 SSD disk image on one of the other internal PC hard drives and I didn’t need to connect an external USB disk. Therefore I pressed the “Enter” key to continue.

Clonezilla presented a list of detected disks and I pressed the Control and C keys to proceed to the next step.

Clonezilla then asked for the device containing the disk images. I had previously saved the original M.2 SSD image in the sdc1 disk. Therefore I selected it and I clicked the “OK” button.

I did not need to use “fsck” to check and repair this disk because it had Windows NTFS partitions, so I chose the “no-fsck” option and I clicked “OK”.

Then I selected the “Clonezilla” directory that contained the original M.2 SSD disk image.

I clicked on the “Done” button to go to the next screen.

As can see in the next screenshot, Clonezilla then mounted the /dev/sdc1 disk with the “Clonezilla” directory as /home/partimag so that it could use it. I pressed the “Enter” key to continue.

Clonezilla user interface will give access to more or less options depending on the mode selected in this screen. I selected Clonezilla’s “Beginner” mode because I didn’t need to use the advanced options.

The next Clonezilla menu presented a list of actions or “modes” available, I chose “restoredisk” in order to restore the backup of the old M.2 SSD to the new one.

The Clonezilla image directory had a single disk image, created earlier to back up the old M.2 SSD. I selected it and I clicked the “OK” button.

The next step was to select the destination disk to which the image would be restored. Please note that all partitions and data on this disk will be erased during the restoration. So be sure to choose the right disc! The new M.2 SSD was identified here as “nvme0n1”, I selected it and I pressed the “OK” button.

In the next screen, Clonezilla asks about the mode to create the partition table on the target disk. The default option is to use the partition table of the original disk using information from the source image file. It is also possible to create the partition table proportionally in order to fill the entire disk. I chose the first option so as not to change the size of the disk partitions. I would expand the size of the C: volume later using Microsoft’s tools once the disk image restoration is complete.

The next screen is used to specify whether to check or not the integrity of the image to ensure that it can be restored. It was not necessary here because Clonezilla had already checked it right after creating the image and therefore I chose the second option “-scr” to skip the check. Anyway you can choose the first option if you are unsure.

In the next screen Clonezilla’s wizard asks about what to do once the image has been restored: use a command line, reboot or shut down the computer. I chose the first option “-p choose” in order to decide it later.

Clonezilla then displays the command line it is going execute based on the selected options, that will allow you to execute it manually later if necessary. I pressed the “Enter” key to launch the restore process.

Restoring the image results in the deletion of partitions and data from the destination disk, and it is not possible to recover them (unless you have a backup copy of the destination disk). Therefore, Clonezilla asks for confirmation before performing the image restoration.

And to ensure that you are fully aware of the consequences for the destination disk, Clonezilla asks for a second confirmation before running the command line and starting the restoration.

Clonezilla then erased the partition table of the destination disk.

And it started to restore the different partitions of the original disk image to the destination disk. First, it restored a small NTFS system partition.

Then it restored the second partition, a FAT32 partition with a size of 100 MB.

Finally Clonezilla restored the third partition with the C: volume (and Windows 10 installation) which had a size of approximately 256 GB. It took a bit less than 42 minutes for this one, the amount of time depends mostly on the amount of data to restore and the disks speed.

Clonezilla later restored the disk boot sector.

And after that, it checked the sizes of the partitions but it did not modify them because I had previously selected to keep the original partitions size.

Clonezilla then performed some maintenance tasks for the NTFS partitions of the new disk.

After that it checked the different partitions to update information for a possible Linux installation, which it didn’t find here because the cloned disk only had a Windows 10 installation.

Clonezilla then updated the entry in the motherboard’s UEFI BIOS memory so that it could boot the computer with the Windows installation on this new disk.

This was the last step of the M.2 SSD image cloning process. I pressed the “Enter” key to continue.

Finally Clonezilla asked to select what it should do now. I selected the first entry “poweroff” in order to power off the computer.

Once the computer turned off, I removed the USB flash disk with Clonezilla then I turned the computer back on and entered into the UEFI BIOS to check if it was properly configured to use Windows Boot Manager with the new SSD. Which was indeed the case. Please note that the user interface and options will depend on the motherboard BIOS.

Finally I restarted the computer using the BIOS “Save & Exit” menu.

Windows 10 Pro then booted from the new M.2 SSD without any problems and after a few seconds I had access to all the documents and software from the original disk. This meant that the SSD disk cloning operation had gone perfectly, Great 🙂 ! I still had to expand the partition size of volume C: in order to benefit from the additional storage space of this new disk. But we will see how to do that in the next page of this tutorial.