[Fixed] Clonezilla Failed to Clone

What is Clonezilla？

Clonezilla is a popular system cloning tool with multiple functions such as disk cloning, disk backup, disk image creation and data recovery.

Avaliable in Microsoft Windows operating and GNU/Linux, this user-favorite disk cloning software can clone not only entire systems but individual partitions as well. In addition, the software advertises that it can support unattended mode, as almost all steps can be done through commands and options.

Why Clonezilla failed to clone?

We often see some help posts on forums related to Clonezilla clone hard drive failed. Why doesn't this popular disk cloning software work?

In fact, when there're bad sectors on the source drive, you may be denied access to the data in it, and then Clonezilla would failed to clone bad sectors. It also cannot clone larger drive to smaller drive, because it will clone the entire source disk to the destination disk, even if the used space is less than the destination hard drive.

In order to solve the mentioned problems and successfully clone disks with Clonezilla, we’ll provide two solutions below.

How to fix Clonezilla failed to clone issue

If you encounter Clonezilla failed to clone due to small target disk capacity or bad sectors, you take the following measures:

│Method 1. Change to a larger disk

When you use Clonezilla to migrate a large disk to a smaller disk, maybe you just want to clone the used space. However, Clonezilla doesn't fully understand your intentions, it will only mechanically clone the entire hard disk to the destination disk, and eventually cause you to get a failure message of "destination disk is too small".

Therefore, if you insist on using Clonezilla to clone the hard drive to a smaller drive, you can change to a larger disk to fundamentally solve the Clonezilla clone disk failure.

│Method 2. Remove bad sector

If Clonezilla failed to clone due to bad sectors, you can try to use Windows built-in tools Command Prompt to fix bad sectors. CHKDKS is a command used in CMD to check the integrity of the file system, you can use it to search and remove bad sectors in the computer. The specific steps to handle the bad sectors are as follows:

Step 1. Press "Windows+ R" to open the "Run" program. Enter "cmd" and click "Run as Administer" to open CMD.

Step 2. Type "chkdsk g: /f /r /x" and hit "Enter". (Here, we just take "g" as an example, you need to replace "g" with the target drive.)

Note: The letters in the Chkdsk command have their own function: "/f" refers to repairing errors on the disk; "/r" helps you locate bad sectors and restore readable information; "/x" can force delete the target volume if necessary.

Step 3. Type "exit" and press "Enter" to exit CMD.

After successfully removing the bad sectors, you can restart Clonezilla and use it to clone the hard drive.

A better way to clone disk without issues

If following the above two methods can help you solve the problem of Clonezilla failed to clone, that would be great. But when you still can't clone a disk to another one with Clonezilla, you can try a near-perfect alternative-AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional.

This powerful disk cloning expert can clone the whole hard disk to another, even with bad sectors on it. In a graphic user's interface, it provides two cloning methods to meet the different needs of users:

☂ Sector-by-Sector Clone: Refers to cloning all sectors of a hard drive, the unused space is also copied to another drive to obtain an exact copy. When there are bad sectors or blank sectors in the source disk, don’t worry, this reliable tool guarantees to complete the task.
☂ Clone Disk Quickly: Only copy the used space, which can achieve the goal of some users to clone a larger drive to a smaller one.

│Before your cloning task

Please do the following preparations before cloning the hard disk:

✿ Prepare a SATA to USB cable to connect the destination disk to your laptop in advance, or use a small screwdriver to install the SSD to a desktop computer.

✿ The capacity of the target disk must be larger than the used space of the source disk, otherwise the cloning task will fail.
✿ If the destination hard disk is a new disk, please initialize it first. (If not, ignore this step.)
✿ Connect your computer to the power supply to prevent migration failure due to sudden power loss of the computer.

│Guidance: Clone your disk to anther one

You can follow the steps below to clone the hard drive to another if you're sure all preparation have been made.

Step 1. Install and launch AOMEI Partition Assistant, click "Clone" in the main interface, and select "Clone Disk".

Step 2. Choose the hard disk that you need to clone as the source disk and click "Next".

Step 3. Select the destination disk to store the data on the source disk, and then click "Next".

Step 4. Then, you can check the source and destination disk in the next window or change to "Sector to Sector clone", and click the "Confirm" button to continue if there is no problem.

Here, you can also click the "Settings" button to adjust the partition size on the destination disk or tick "4k alignment" to improve the reading and writing speed of the SSD if the target disk is an SSD drive. 

Step 5. After returning to the main interface, check the pending operation and click "Apply" and "Proceed" to commit the operation.

Warning: Please change the boot drive after completing the disk clone, otherwise the computer cannot boot normally.

Last line

How to fix Clonezilla failed to clone? In this article, we provide a way to fix Clonezilla clone failure. We also introduced an alternative to Clonezilla, which allows you to clone the disk without reinstalling and successfully boot from it.

Of course, this versatile disk manager also provides you with Move programs to another drive, Allocate free space, Convert File System between FAT32 and NTFS, etc. Come and try it.