So, I need to dual boot my computer into windows. I have been using only zorin for a while but now I need to dual boot for school. I purchased a new drive, so I don’t have to partition my current drive but it is larger than my current drive. Is there an easy way to move zorin onto the new drive and have windows on my current one? Or will I just have to flash zorin onto the new one and then reimage windows onto my current one?
What you want is cloning software. You can use proprietary software like Acronis. I have used it for years but it costs.
Or you can choose free software like Clonezilla that you will flash and then boot into on a computer with the old drive and the new drive attached via an adapter. I don’t think it works if the drive is in the computer. Last time I did this a month ago, it didn’t detect the internal drive, only the drives we had attached via USB adapters.
You’ll be able to clone the old drive to the new one and even customize if you want the sizing to remain the same, relatively speaking, or let it consume the new drive naturally, which I prefer.
Once you do that, then you can move on to doing dual boot.
Be careful doing it this way though. Because dual booting by installing Windows after Linux usually requires you to reconfigure your Linux bootloader (GRUB, systemd, etc.) because Windows will override it with its own bootloader that doesn’t recognize any other OS. It’s not impossible, just annoying so most people opt to install Windows then install Linux for dual booting in that order. If you can, you might choose to install Windows on the new drive and then install Zorin afterwards and then bring over your old files and settings after the fact. That might be an easier method here than cloning.