Mageia forum

Suggestions for cloning an NTFS filesystem to a new partition using ntfsclone.
Since ntfsclone syntax doesn't distinguish between an output file or output partition,
the output partition must be created before cloning. Otherwise ntfsclone will create a file instead of a new partition.

So statements like

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# ntfsclone -output /dev/sdc1 /dev/sda1

or

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# ntfsclone -restore-image -output /dev/sdc1 /pathto/imagefile

will attempt to create a file in /dev/ called sdc1.
(Note that the last item in the line is the source filesystem.)

Instead
1) Create the output partition. (/dev/sdc1 in above example.)
It must be large enough to hold the filesystem.
2) according to source, use

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# ntfsclone -overwrite /dev/sdc1 /dev/sda1

or

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# ntfsclone -restore-image -overwrite /dev/sdc1 /pathto/imagefile

The need to explicitly create the target partition was omitted from the ntfsclone man page, which contains other useful info.

Hope this helps others that were blocked by this issue.