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

[Phil Turmel]

On 10/25/2012 09:00 AM, Ron Frazier (ALE) wrote:
> Hi Phil,
> 
> Thanks for that info.  That brings up a few of more questions.
> 
> a) Will this work even if the target device is the shorter one?

Yes, with two caveats:
1) No partition may extend past the end of the target.
2) If GPT instead of classic DOS partitioning, the backup copy of the
GPT will not be copied.  Re-running parted on the copy should offer to
fix it.

> b) Will it work if the final partition doesn't end on a 1M boundary?

Yes.

> c) Does it copy the MBR?

Yes.

> d) What happens if there is a read error on the source or write error
> on the target?

With dd, it bails out at that point, and reports where it stopped.  You
can resume with seek= and skip= options, or use 'dd_rescue' or
'ddrescue' instead of 'dd'.

> e) Does it copy partition attributes like "active" and "boot", etc.?

Yes.  These are in the partition table(s).

> f) Will it work if the source file system is mounted, ie, I'm running
> from the HDD, or do I have to use a live CD?

It should work, but the target fs will likely need an fsck afterwards.
Some log file corruption would be expected.  I don't do that.

> I never said why I wanted to do this in the original post, but, I
> want the target drive to be a backup of the source, so, I could just
> swap it in and run it in the event of a failure of the source drive.
> In my case, I have both NTFS and EXT4 file systems, and the boot
> loader is Win NT.

Yes, although you may get an alert from "Disk Management" that the drive
serial number is different.  With XP, you get a "new hardware" popup and
that's it.

> Thanks for the help.

You're welcome.

Phil