Re: [OT] How to back up new (to me) Win 11 laptop

Does your laptop have a DVD player? Simplest way would be to boot off a 
live Linux DVD and clone your Win installation from there.

as root:

ls -al /dev/sd*

you should probably see just /dev/sda*

plug in your USB drive

ls -al /dev/sd*

compare this with the previous listing and look for a new device

you should now see a new device something like /dev/sdb (if you already 
had a /dev/sdb* then you would probably see /dev/sdc) anyway it will be 
something that wasn't in the first listing.

You need to mount that e.g.
mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt

use df to see how much space is availble:

df -h /mnt

if there is a enough space then you can copy an image of you win 
installation to it if not and you have other /dev/sdb partitions unmount 
sdb1 and try mounting one of them instead.

umount /mnt
mount /dev/sdb2 /mnt

rinse and repeat for sdb3, sdb4 etc until you find a partition with enough 
space. Then just copy your win installtion using dd

dd if=/dev/sda of=/mnt/win11-20260817-1.img bs=64M

Be VERY carefull here "if" is your input, "of" is your output. If you get 
these mixed up you could destroy you win11 installation.

Now the VERY good news. This is a full clone. Any hidden WinBlows anti 
copy data will ALSO be preserved allowing you to recreate the orginal 
disc!!!

To restore win11 to a new drive you simply need to reverse the "if" and 
"of".

If instead of backing up you wish to clone the drive say to an SSD that 
has been mounted using a USB to SATA adapter then you would do something 
like:

dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=64M

NOTE: you don't mount sdb first!!!

Before you remove anything! use sync to make sure it has actually been 
written.

sync

Writing to a flash drive can be very quick but the prompt might come back 
before the writing has been finished (which is done in the background).

BEWARE BEWARE BEWARE:
if you are cloning to an SSD with a RAM cache (a qood quality expensive 
SSD such as a samsung EVO) then you should leave this for several seconds 
before unplugging it (a minute wouldn't hurt). The problem here is that 
the RAM cache could actually take a while to be written to perminant flash 
even after the "sync" has compleated.

Hope this helps. What model Lenovo laptop did you get? the T420 is awsome 
even though the i5 only really has two cores :-$

Best Regards
Sergio


On Sun, 16 Aug 2026, Dwayne Reid wrote:

> Good day to all.  I purchased a used Lenovo laptop with a fresh install of
> Windows 11.  I would like to back it up before I begin installing my normal
> software applications.
>
> My most recent copy of Acronis is version 2021.  If I recall correctly, my
> best option is to create a biitabke USB drive that Win 11 will boot from.
> I no longer recall how to do that.
>
> Can someone point me towards information on how to do this?
>
> Many thanks!
>
> dwayne
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