[clug] Clonezilla - anyone had experience with it?

steve jenkin sjenkin at canb.auug.org.au
Tue Jun 4 08:52:39 UTC 2019


I recently got to use Clonezilla and wondered how others found it.

It comes as either a Ubuntu or Debian bootable image, running off a USB.

Had some problems with booting on an old machine.
It worked one day, but when I came back, the UEFI boot failed.
An MBR boot version worked fine - but a lot of farnarkling finding a test rig and confirming it would work.

On The Big Day, cloning an internal SATA disk to an external HDD in a USB-3 dock, it didn’t quite go smoothly.

First attempt a week ago had stalled & was killed the next day…  The target 1TB disk was 200k too small as well :(
This time round the first copy stalled as well.
Second attempt got up and running at 9.5GB/min and stayed there, finished 1TB in under an hour.

it eventually worked ‘like it said on the tin’. Happy with that.

I’m left with many questions:

	- is this “copy stalls on a block, won’t proceed” a common thing? [uses partclone]

	- being a novice with it, I tried device-device copy 1s time and failed because 1TB disks are only same-same.
		- The ext2 source only had 650GB used. Any way to use another option to copy and resize down?

	- Stupidly didn’t copy the MBR boot loader (grub I presume) the second time.
		- two reboots and two runs of grub-install & it finally worked.
		- does the MBR copy “Just Work” - I’d had problems with the first stalled & aborted copy.

What I’d really like to be able to do is take disk images of a set of 4-5 older Windows systems used for testing.
Drives are ~150GB, so a modern ~$100 HDD would fit them all.

Is this straight forward?
Are there gotchas I need to be aware of, especially in rebuilding drives from images?

regards
steve

--
Steve Jenkin, IT Systems and Design 
0412 786 915 (+61 412 786 915)
PO Box 38, Kippax ACT 2615, AUSTRALIA

mailto:sjenkin at canb.auug.org.au http://members.tip.net.au/~sjenkin




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