1 Topic by shagbark (edited by shagbark 2022-01-13 23:05:20)

  • shagbark
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Topic: Can't copy a Windows boot partition

I used GParted 1.3.0 to copy my Windows boot drive partition, from an SSD onto a partition of exactly the same size on a standard hard drive.  That was to back up my Windows partition.

Now I'm trying to use GParted 1.3.1 to do the same thing--to back up my Windows drive by copying it onto the backup partition. But GParted won't let me.  The "paste" option is grayed out when I try to, even though the partitions are the same length in bytes, have the same format, and the same flags; and I've already done this same copy before with GParted 1.3.0.

Is this a bug, or a feature?

One idea I had is that perhaps GParted won't let me do this because when I copied the partition the first time, it copied the UUID, so both partitions have the same UUID.  Perhaps GParted compares the target UUID to the source UUID as a way of checking whether you're trying to copy a partition to itself.

I could test this by changing the UUID on the backup, and then trying to copy; but I don't want to, because then my backup wouldn't be a functional backup anymore, as the Windows activation is tied to the UUID.

2 Reply by mfleetwo

  • mfleetwo
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Re: Can't copy a Windows boot partition

Nothing changed in GParted 1.3.1 (Release Notes) that is related to your issue.

GParted does not do anything like check UUIDs of file systems to prevent overwriting them.

Please provide the output from the following commands, for both your source and destination drives (replace /dev/sda with each drive individually) and let me know which partition you are copy from where to where.

sudo parted /dev/sda unit s print
sudo fdisk -l /dev/sda
sudo gdisk -l /dev/sda
sudo lsblk -o name,maj:min,rm,size,ro,type,fstype,label,mountpoint