Cloning a Partition


There are two ways that you can clone a partition:

  1. Select a partition and then choose clone from the menu and pick a disk to clone to.
  2. Select and drag a partition to the disk that you want to clone to. You can clone to the same disk by dragging the partition onto the free space.

iPartition will always create a new partition so there must be sufficient unused space in the partition map on the disk (note that this is not the same as free space within a filesystem). If you want to overwrite an existing partition with the clone, simply delete the existing partition first and then you will be able to perform the clone.

After you have cloned the partition, you can resize and otherwise manipulate the partition.

If you are trying to clone a bootable Windows partition, be aware that it is unlikely that the clone will boot correctly after you have performed the clone. To fix this, you will need to run the the Startup Repair system recovery option which should come on the Windows installation DVD.

The clone will not be completely identical to the source partition because iPartition will change the unique identifier that most filesystems have; it is not a good idea to have two volumes with the same unique identifier on the same system. Practically speaking this will have little impact, but it might affect situations where you make a clone and then use that clone to overwrite the original (as part of a backup and restore procedure).

For speed reasons, the cloning operation will only clone filesystem data that is used (for filesystems that iPartition supports), so it is important that the filesystem does not have any inconsistencies. We recommend that you check your partitions for errors (using the OS supplied utilities) before trying to clone a partition, or, for that matter, trying to perform any kind of partition manipulation.