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

James Sumners james.sumners at gmail.com
Thu Oct 25 10:58:32 EDT 2012


On Thu, Oct 25, 2012 at 9:31 AM, Phil Turmel <philip at turmel.org> wrote:
> On 10/25/2012 09:01 AM, James Sumners wrote:
>> 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.
>
> Ron's request specifically stated that the last partition was within the
> size of the target.  So yes, the out-of-space error as the end is
> expected and harmless.

Not if the source is fragmented and has data in that final 20GB that
really shouldn't have been.

>> 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`
>
> I suspected from Ron's other postings that one of the partitions was
> ntfs... this scrambles the ACLs and renders that partition effectively
> unusable.  Ron later confirmed, so no, this isn't appropriate.
>
> I heartily approve of this approach for pure linux FSs, the target ends
> up without fragmentation.

I answered the question with the information I had. Linux mailing
list, Linux answer *shrug*.


-- 
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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