Issue:
Having started the initial encryption on an older computer, a customer realized that the drive in the computer was unstable and definitely beyond end of life, with the result that initial encryption was not progressing well. He decided to replace the hard drive with a fresh, new drive.
The question was, how to clone a computer drive while it is still somewhere in the process of undergoing initial encryption?
Cause:
Unfortunately, there’s no way to stop and reverse the encryption once it has begun – it must run all the way through to completion.
Resolution:
One solution lends itself quite readily to this situation:
- Shut the machine down
- Boot from some other media (e.g. WinPE disk, or a bootable CloneZillla disk) and ...
- Use some sector-by-sector cloning tool (eg. Ghost on top of WINPE, or CloneZilla, which is based on Linux) to create a copy of the drive contents
There’s no reason why the disk cannot be cloned (sector by sector) in its partially-encrypted state (as long as its not actively trying to continue to encrypt itself – hence the need to boot from something other than the machine’s own OS).
Once the downstream clone of the sector-by-sector copy of the original has been booted up, it will "think" it’s the same computer, and it will just pick up encrypting where it's "parent" disk had left off when it was shut down. After that it will just continue encrypting until it has completed its initial encryption.