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

[JD]

Check out partimage.  If it knows the file system, it can handle larger to
smaller recoveries.  If it doesn't, then it uses dd too.  It is a disk-image
backup and easy to use.

'man partimage' should answer everything. Google should answer anything thing else.






On 10/25/2012 09:19 AM, Phil Turmel wrote:
> 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.
>