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

[Phil Turmel]

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