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I’m using GParted to clone all data from HDD to SSD on each Workstation in our Company.

I got two problems there:

  1. How do I copy the Microsoft Reserved Partition? GParted marks this as unknown (which is absolutely understandable, since GParted is a Linux "System"). Is it even needed to be on the SSD? Or can I just leave plain space there which is as big as the Microsoft Reserved Partition?

  2. There seems to be a problem with FAT32 System reserved partitions. How can I force them to NTFS? with convert c: /FS:NTFS it doesn’t work.

Despite everything worked without any errors, the workstation isn’t able to boot from the SSD.

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Use the right tool for the job. gparted is a partition editor, not a data mover. For that, you want something like dd. Check the manpage - it's an old program, and its commands are a bit atypical compared to modern tools - but it should be simple enough. You can copy entire disks (with all data, including boot records and partition tables), or just copy individual partitions (which will include the partition header / volume boot record). You can use gparted to resize partitions before (or after) copying, of course, or to pre-create the partition layout if you want to copy partitions one at a time. I recommend using a reasonable block size (the BS parameter) for dd; a few megabytes at least. It's pretty slow on anything the size of a disk (or even partition) otherwise.

I have no idea how important the Microsoft Reserved partitions that Windows loves to create these days really are. I think they might be related to the Win8+ refresh/reset features of Windows, but I really don't know. They're usually quite small, though, so I would just copy them unless you have a reason not to. dd doesn't need to know the layout; it just copies blocks of data.

To use convert.exe with a partition, you need to mount it first. By default, Windows does not mount the EFI System partition. The C: drive is the OS partition, which is something else entirely (and Windows hasn't supported booting from one of those formatted as FAT32 since Vista). To mount the EFI system partition, try using the mountvol.exe command. For example, mountvol S: /S. If that doesn't work for some reason, you can do it using diskpart.exe and its assign command. Note that these commands must be run as Admin. After mounting the EFI System partition, you can (assuming you mounted it at drive S:) use convert S: /FS:NTFS to convert the partition to NTFS.

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    gparted does have copy functionality, but it does not work for the Microsoft Reserved Partition -- gparted.sourceforge.net/…
    – Menachem
    Jun 30, 2016 at 0:47
  • @Menachem: Frankly, I don't trust [g]parted on mixed Windows/* GPT disks right now. Last year I had a drive recovery set back by a week or so of work after gparted decided it was a good idea to remove the read-only flag from the partition being recovered, despite not being instructed to make any changes to that partition and certainly without prompting or even indicating it was going to do so.
    – CBHacking
    Jun 30, 2016 at 2:15

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