[clug] Clonezilla - anyone had experience with it?

Bob Edwards bob at cs.anu.edu.au
Fri Jun 7 00:11:43 UTC 2019


On 4/6/19 6:52 pm, steve jenkin via linux wrote:
> 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

Hi Steve, all,

We use Clonezilla for golden-imaging Windows 10 lab machines (after
sysprep'ing them).

We "roll our own" PXE-boot rescue image straight from Debian into
which we can install any and all manner of rescue and imaging tools
including clonezilla etc. It is surprisingly easy to roll your own
Debian PXE-boot image, using debootstrap etc. and then you can
trivially keep it up to date etc. We do it on a read-only NFS-mounted
root file-system, which allows us to boot many clients simultaneously
from the same image.

cheers,
Bob Edwards.

> 
> --
> 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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