Cloning a bitlocker encrypted disk

bitlockerdd

Our company's had its laptops for just over 2 years now and they have all become slow and many of them have had their harddisks dying randomly lately. I noticed that many of my colleagues use a tilted stance for their docking stations. I suppose that's not ideal for disk performance and durability. So I want to replace all disks with an SSD.

I've cloned (boot) disks before, in server environments mainly and once in my laptop at home (which runs Linux) using dd:

dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=32M

However, I've never done this with an NTFS drive that is encrypted using Bitlocker. Will this work? I wouldn't want to buy a stack of SSDs only to find out my plan is flawed.

Best Answer

Since it seems like the original question was never answered, I've tested using GNU dd to clone a disk encrypted with Microsoft BitLocker (in my case it was a spinning disk to a SSD) and it worked fine. In my case the disk sizes were the same.

For reference:

dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb

Naturally change the devices to work with your setup.

To elaborate a bit more on the process I use:

  1. Create a Linux live USB (I use the gparted linux distro, but nearly anyone will work since dd is part of GNU CoreUtils and therefore practically always present)
  2. Boot the system with it
  3. Open an admin terminal, and run dd as appropriate for your environment. You can optionally use the gparted application to see the results once it's done.
  4. Shutdown the computer
  5. Remove the Linux USB
  6. Make the physical changes (ie. replace the old disk with the new one)
  7. Boot into Windows as normal
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