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I recently purchased a new laptop that comes pre-installed with Windows. However, my intention is to erase the Windows installation entirely and replace it with Ubuntu, as I've always done with my previous devices.

The dilemma I'm facing is that the new laptop comes with a valid and legal version of Windows, and I'd like to preserve it for potential future use on my old laptop. If I go ahead and erase the disk to install Ubuntu, I'll lose this Windows license.

Here are my main questions:

  1. Does it make sense to perform a bit-by-bit copy of the laptop's disk onto an external drive?
  2. Is it feasible to expect the external disk to be bootable with Windows?
  3. If the above is possible, could you guide me on how to achieve it. Which command line can I use to clone a disk.

Because the computer is not mine (work) I'm not allowed to physically swap the hardware. That would have been simpler to swap the hard drives.

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  • Note that the preinstalled Windows key won't migrate to the old computer. The preinstalled will only have a valid key for the system it was installed on. Microsoft since Windows 10 has been changing how keys work when moved between systems. It's why there's no Windows 11 key on laptops anymore that you can just use.
    – Thomas Ward ♦
    Commented Jan 30 at 17:45
  • Ok interesting. So the answer is just no.
    – JRR
    Commented Jan 30 at 17:48
  • you can make a clone of the Windows disk, but there's a very HIGH probability the license key will not be detected or will not activate, and you'd need to get a separate Windows license. (Note this is not Windows support here, this is just something I've observed as an admin over years). Will it clone? Yes. Will it boot? Yes. Will it be a legit activated Windows on a different system? Probably not. Microsoft ties activations to hardware profiles so.
    – Thomas Ward ♦
    Commented Jan 30 at 17:58
  • Thanks for your answer. Of course this is not the place to ask window's question, but i did not consider this case to be possible.
    – JRR
    Commented Jan 30 at 18:06
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    An OEM Windows license is not stored on disk. It is stored in the BIOS in a chip on the motherboard
    – Daniel T
    Commented Jan 30 at 22:38

1 Answer 1

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  1. You can create a bit-to-bit copy with dd command.
sudo dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=4M status=progress

Where /dev/sda is a path to your internal drive, and /dev/sdb is an external one. Change it if the paths are different. Specifying block size with bs=4M makes copy faster (feel free to omit that parameter or specify greater bs). status=progress shows you a copy progress.

Also, you can use Clonezilla live USB to make cloning more convenient.

About your questions 1 and 2. Try the method above and you will know the answers. It depends...

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