How to Dual Boot From A Clone

Pavendaxx · November 8, 2023

I want to clone the OS from my Windows 10 PC and put it into the same Hard Drive as my laptop. I dont know how to do that, is that even possible? Because most dual boot tutorial out there are mostly installing a fresh Windows installation.

But what Im trying to do is clone of my W10 PC OS to be fitted to the same hard drive as my W11 laptop. I really need all the content of my PC hard drive.

C2dan88 · November 9, 2023

On 11/8/2023 at 3:07 AM, Pavendaxx said:

But what Im trying to do is clone of my W10 PC OS to be fitted to the same hard drive as my W11 laptop.

If you want it on the same drive, I would do the following

Reduce C drive on your laptop so win10 can fit.
Only clone the w10 partition (not whole drive), to newly unallocated space - most cloning software should allow for this

To make it bootable. use EasyBCD for adding a manual boot entry for where Win10 is located. This should give you the option of choosing either w11 or w10 during boot.

SpaceGhostC2C · November 9, 2023

On 11/8/2023 at 12:07 AM, Pavendaxx said:

I really need all the content of my PC hard drive.

Dusl boot it's really not the simplest way, nor the best, to achieve that. Sync software, or even a manual one-time copy (since cloning would have no syncing either) are far better for that purpose.

In any case, it is possible, provided your laptop has that mucj free space and the physical distribution of existing data is such that you can shrink the existing partitions enough to accommodate the clones partitions from your PC. Then you would need to run a boot repair tool to detect the second OS and add it to a boot menu (which W10-W11 don't have by default and requires disabling fast boot in the BIOS), since the boot record itsrlf it's a different mini partition and you don't want to overwrite the one in the laptop.

And after all that, the cloned W10 will have all the wrong drivers, so it will throw all sort of errors on first boot, and maybe, maybe after removing/installing the appropriate software and drivers it will eventually run normally.

If data availability is the problem, this is hardly worth doing, and it's certainly not the most effective way of doing it (in fact, once you have the data, you wouldn't really need to boot W10 to access it).