partclone for Windows

Native Windows (x64) builds of partclone — the used-block partition imaging tool from Clonezilla — compiled with the Cygwin toolchain so it works the same way it does on Linux, including Linux-style raw device paths (/dev/sda, /dev/sdb2, …).

⬇ Download the latest release zip — unzip anywhere and run from PowerShell or cmd. No installation, no Cygwin required; all needed DLLs are in the zip. See the README inside the zip for usage and safety notes.

# back up an NTFS partition (Windows Disk 1, partition 2)
.\partclone.ntfs.exe -c -s /dev/sdb2 -o D:\backups\data.pcl.img

# verify and restore
.\partclone.chkimg.exe -s D:\backups\data.pcl.img
.\partclone.ntfs.exe -r -s D:\backups\data.pcl.img -o /dev/sdb2

Included: partclone.{ntfs,extfs,fat,exfat,btrfs,xfs,hfsp,apfs,f2fs,minix,dd, imager,restore,chkimg,info,ntfsfixboot}.exe plus bonus mkntfs, ntfsfix, ntfsinfo.

⚠️ Raw device access needs an elevated terminal, and there is no VSS/snapshot integration — never image a mounted, in-use volume (take it offline in diskpart first). Full caveats in the zip README.

What this repo is

A friendly fork of Thomas-Tsai/partclone. The windows branch is the latest upstream release plus a short series of Windows-specific commits:

1. Cygwin port — header/ioctl portability shims across all filesystem modules (see BUILD-WINDOWS.md for details, including a subtle ntfs-3g struct-packing landmine).
2. TEMP logfile fallback — tools run without -L even though standalone Windows deployments have no /var/log.
3. -C skips the free-space check on -W restores — restoring onto pre-created sparse raw files no longer demands the full device size.
4. NTFS sparse flag kept on -W restore targets — a raw image of a 2 TB partition with 44 GB used allocates ~44 GB, not 2 TB.

These changes are deliberately kept here rather than upstreamed for now (they are Windows-specific).

How releases are made

• A daily check-upstream job opens an issue when upstream publishes a new release.
• Maintainer runs ci/update-to.sh <version> (rebases windows onto the new tag), pushes, and triggers the build-release workflow.
• CI builds everything from source on a clean windows-latest runner (ci/build.sh), runs functional round-trip tests — ext4 and NTFS clone/restore with payload verification, image checks, sparse-restore checks, and packaged-DLL completeness (ci/test.sh, ci/test-dist.ps1) — and publishes the zip as release v<version>-win<N>.

Local build: any Cygwin with the packages listed in .github/workflows/build.yml, then ci/build.sh && ci/test.sh. Details in BUILD-WINDOWS.md.

License

GPL-2.0, same as upstream partclone (see COPYING). Every release zip contains a SOURCES.txt pointing at the exact corresponding source for all bundled components (partclone, ntfs-3g, userspace-rcu, Cygwin runtime).

All credit for partclone itself goes to Thomas Tsai and the partclone contributors — this repo only makes it run on Windows.