PREP WORKING
Please don't try to mess around with dd or ddrescue or Clonezilla...
Getting the drive letter wrong might mean you overwrite your system drive or the one you're trying to save...
I wish I could write an easy little guide, but I'd have to see the output of some commands and the other commands depend on that...
Also, you should disconnect the SATA cables for any other drives.
Just keep the one you are creating and image from and the one you are saving the image to, connected.
Oh...
I forgot to mention, the destination drive, apart from needing to have at least a bit more storage than the source drive, has to be formatted as NTFS...
FAT32 doesn't support file sizes above 4 GB, so you can't store a 512 GB disk image on there.
And yes, usually you'd use ext4 on Linux (which Clonezilla is), but Windows can't read that, so...
TFS.
If you want to prepare as much as possible, download both versions of Clonezilla I guess, the stable and stable alt...
And TestDisk 7.2.
I forgot which flashing tool was compatible with Clonezilla...
I think Rufus?
But I think it needed to be written in raw mode, though I'm not entirely sure...
It has been a while since I made my stick for it.
I've used it not too long ago, but I made the stick well over a year ago...
I have all the exact versions written down, but idk on which drive that is right now.
I'll see if I can figure that out at some point though.
Keep in mind an image will always take up exactly the amount of bytes the source drive has, doesn't matter if the source drive is empty, it will literally just copy every bit on the drive, even if they're all 0.