Reply 20 of 27, by Zup
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- Oldbie
Yesterday I used Clonezilla + Gparted (both lastest versions) to clone a 10Gb HDD into a 40Gb one.
The source HDD was installed into a IBM Thinkpad T42, and I cloned it to an image via USB. I restored that image into a Toshiba Satellite Pro SP4340 maxed to 320 Mb RAM (Clonezilla needs 196 Mb to run). Because I was thinking about erasing the source disk, I restored the image as is and then modified it with Gparted (it could have been expanded with clonezilla, but I wanted to test it before expanding).
The contents of that HDD were four partitions (plus GRUB to make it work):
1.- 2Gb FAT16 partition with MS-DOS 6.22 installed.
2.- 6Gb FAT32 partition with Windows 98SE installed (later expanded to almost 30Gb).
3.- 2Gb ext4 partition with Puppy Linux 5.2.8 installed (later expanded to about 8Gb).
4.- A linux swap partition.
Everything worked fine. I expected GRUB to fail because it can fail if his boot data (usually contained in the Linux partition) is moved or resized, but it worked perfectly.
So, Clonezilla can copy any FAT partition without troubles. The only downside is that latest versions eat too much RAM. That's not a problem if you use a modern computer, but maybe your old systems can't run it. Maybe older versions of clonezilla will work with less RAM, but I couldn't use them (I tried with those included in Parted Magic 2012 and 2013 but they couldn't copy the ext4 filesystem without reverting to old reliable dd).
Other thoughts:
- Norton Ghost have some advantages over Clonezilla. It runs with less RAM, and there are tools to extract files from their images (Clonezilla can only restore the entire image but not extract a single file from it). On the downside, the boot media is DOS based (at least the one I have) so it won't run on UEFI only or USB only computers.
- There are free versions of Acronis True Image. Some years ago when I bought a WD HDD, WD had in their site some kind of Acronis WD Edition. It was a special edition of Acronis True Image that anybody could use provided he has a WD HDD (that sayd the site, I never tried if it worked without that). So, if you have a WD drive (even connected to USB ports, you're free to use Acronis 😉
- A disk imaging tool that runs on modern OSs? Most tools runs offline (=they boot their own media) so using them in a computer that have Windows 10 installed wouldn't be an issue.
- If you want a tool that runs over Windows 10 and can make images from USB connected disks (remember that most tools can't copy a mounted partition), forget about Clonezilla and dd (and maybe ddrescue) because they are only for Linux.
I have traveled across the universe and through the years to find Her.
Sometimes going all the way is just a start...