Splitting current mint+windows drive into separate drives

[davyt]

Currently I have a 2tb drive dual booting with both mint cinnamon 21.3 and win10 on it. I want to make a backup but only have 3x 1tb drives. I also think it's probably just better to have windows on its own drive anyway, plus I think I can then encrypt the whole windows drive with bitlocker and maybe the mint drive with LUKS too. So seems better all round to split them onto different drives.

So what I want to do is just move windows off my mint drive into another drive, leaving this 2tb drive as mint only. Once that is done I can then easily backup the newly separated drives individually with clonezilla or something.

What I'm trying to figure out is the best way to move windows off my current drive, in a way that leaves me still able to dual boot on the very rare occasion I boot into windows. Obviously shifting the windows partition (and the 128mb "microsoft reserved partition" and the 500mb 'recovery' partition) off this drive is easy (i guess clonezilla is best for this? just copy the partitions over then delete from the mint drive), it's what do I do with the EFI partition which contains grub, and how to handle and set up the dual booting. I want it to boot straight into mint by default, no need for any grub menus. On the rare occasion I boot windows, I can just do it via the bios boot menu (f12). Just not sure how to set it up that way.

[bendipa]

...'but only have 3x 1tb drives...'

Only 3 drives?You haven't said whether you are running a UEFI system or MBR. If you post output of sudo parted -l, that would be a useful start.

Moving Windows 10 is relatively easy. You really need a reliable image maker like Macrium Reflect to be sure of doing it properly. Used to be a free version of this, but I think Macrium may have stopped it, There's a free version of Easeus, but never used that myself. There's also Linux's Clonezilla, but not tried that eitther.You can also use Win10's built-in system image maker, but that's less reliable, but maybe worth a try. In that case, you'll need to use the Win10 Advanced Start-up Options to restore that image.

Whichever method you use, you make an image of the C: partition (called the Boot partition), the ESP (System partition if you're running UEFI) , the MSR partition and the Recovery partition (if you have one). One image captures all of those, then restore the image to another disk.

Because Windows has been moved to another disk, it will have a different boot-up path to the previous one. You then need to reconfigure Window's BCD file in the ESP (also uisng the Advanced Start-up Options), but first need to know what boot-up system your computer is running. (UEFI or MBR)? Once you can boot Win10 then you then remove all of Win10's partitions on original disk.That's it in a nutshell.