[ale] how do I clone a hard drive with clonezilla

James Sumners james.sumners at gmail.com
Thu Oct 25 09:01:24 EDT 2012


He said he wants to clone the _larger_ drive to the smaller drive.
Since dd is a block-for-block copy, it won't be able to copy to the
smaller drive; unless you don't care that it will error out with 20GB
of blocks left to copy.

In regard to Clonezilla, directly from clonezilla.org: "The
destination partition must be equal or larger than the source one."
Also, "For unsupported file system, sector-to-sector copy is done by
dd in Clonezilla."

I think the best way to "clone" this drive to the smaller one is to
prepare the partitions on the second drive and then copy the file
system over. You can do it with two computers or with both drives in
one computer, and there are multiple ways of doing it. I usually just
use ssh, netcat, and tar:

(on the destination machine) `cd /where/the/partition/is/mounted/ &&
nc -l 5555 | tar xf - `
(on the source machine) `cd /where/the/partition/is/mounted/ && tar cf
- * | nc 192.168.0.5 5555`

You can work `pv` in to get progress bars
(http://www.ivarch.com/programs/pv.shtml).

You should do this with both machines booted to some sort of rescue
system (http://www.sysresccd.org/).

You should also zero out the free space on the source drive before
starting the copy.

On Thu, Oct 25, 2012 at 8:33 AM, Phil Turmel <philip at turmel.org> wrote:
> On 10/24/2012 03:10 AM, Ron Frazier (ALE) wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> How do I make an exact sector by sector clone of a hard drive with
>> clonezilla?
>>
>> I want to clone /dev/sda, a 320 gb hard drive with several partitions
>> and various file systems but only less than 300 gb allocated to the
>> partitions
>>
>> to
>>
>> /dev/sdb, a 300 gb hard drive.
>>
>> I want every partition to be copied exactly sector by sector to the
>> 2nd drive.  I also want the mbr to be copied.  However, I want the
>> unallocated space at the end of the drive to be ignored.  The big
>> drive will have more than 20 gb at the end unallocated.  The small
>> drive will have about 3 gb unallocated when done.
>>
>> I know this can be done, because Acronis true image does it fine.
>>
>> Every time I try it with clonezilla, it complains about the 2nd drive
>> being too small and aborts.
>>
>> I specifically want all sectors within all partitions to be copied,
>> even unused ones.  But I don't want unallocated space at the end of
>> the drive to be copied.
>
> I don't use clonezilla...  but I know that 'dd' does exactly what you
> want.  Any liveCD will have it available:
>
> dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=1M
>
> This copies sector for sector until the end of the shorter device.  The
> "bs=1M" dramatically improves the speed of the copy.
>
> Personally, I use 'dc3dd' for such tasks, as it provides a nice progress
> indicator and other options.  You usually have to modify a liveUSB to
> include it, so might not suit you at this point.
>
> HTH,
>
> Phil
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-- 
James Sumners
http://james.roomfullofmirrors.com/

"All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts
pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it
is magnetic to the corruptible. Such people have a tendency to become
drunk on violence, a condition to which they are quickly addicted."

Missionaria Protectiva, Text QIV (decto)
CH:D 59


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