{"id":222,"date":"2009-10-06T18:49:15","date_gmt":"2009-10-06T17:49:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/projects.kmi.open.ac.uk\/era\/vowlan\/?p=222"},"modified":"2009-10-14T12:32:39","modified_gmt":"2009-10-14T11:32:39","slug":"disk-imaging-with-clonezilla","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/projects.kmi.open.ac.uk\/era\/vowlan\/2009\/10\/06\/disk-imaging-with-clonezilla\/","title":{"rendered":"Disk Imaging with Clonezilla."},"content":{"rendered":"
\"CloneZilla!\"<\/a>

CloneZilla!<\/p><\/div>\n

Once our netbooks have their operating systems and software installed on them, when they’ve been tested and tinkered with, it’d be a shame to have to do all that again without good reason. To avoid wasting time in the future, it makes sense to back-up the whole system whilst it’s nice and tidy, so if there are problems later we can roll back to a ‘known good’ installation quickly. There are several packages for doing this – Norton Ghost<\/a> and Ghost-4-Unix<\/a> are well known, but a slightly obscure project from the Taiwanese National Centre for High-performance Computing<\/a> called Clonezilla<\/a> beats them all on either price or performance, or both.<\/p>\n

Clonezilla Live USB version<\/a> takes up about 110MB of space on a USB pen-drive, and is a Debian<\/a>-based boot disk that will allow you to copy partitions<\/a> or whole disks to either a clone disk or a disk-image, using either a local disk or partition (not the one you’re copying…) or a remote SSH<\/a>, SAMBA<\/a> or NFS<\/a> server. Clonezilla can copy most Windows, Mac or Linux filesystems, and unlike many of it’s competitors it only images the parts of the disk that have data on them, which leads to smaller image files being created more quickly.
\nWe used a 2GB USB pen-drive, downloaded the Stable Clonezilla Live .zip file<\/a> and followed these instructions<\/a> to make our Clonezilla boot drive. It’s really worth paying attention to the instructions, because you could easily format\/overwrite the hard disk you’re working on if you make a mistake. Installing Gparted<\/a> before you start could make things easier to follow – you can quickly see which disk is your boot disk and which disk is your USB drive.
\nTo make your Clonezilla pen-drive boot the Asus you’ll need to press ESC at POST<\/a> time, before the GRUB<\/a> boot-loader starts, this will give you a list of boot device options<\/a> to choose from. When you get to the Clonezilla start screen<\/a>, pick the 800×600 display option (using the arrow, tab and spacebar keys to navigate and select in the ncurses<\/a> interface), we used a second USB-drive, an 8Gb one, to save the disk image to – you can plug this into the Asus when prompted by Clonezilla<\/a>. You’ll have to make two images using Clonezilla to back-up your system, as there are 2 solid state disk drives, a 4GB one and a 16GB one, as described in the previous post<\/a>. My 4GB SSD was imaged in about 3 minutes and 20 seconds, and the 16GB disk in about 5 minutes 50 seconds – Clonezilla is quick!<\/p>\n

Here’s a list of what Clonezilla wrote on my pen-drive:<\/p>\n

.:
\ntotal 8.0K
\ndrwx—— 2 era root 4.0K 2009-10-06 17:45 16GB_part-901-1_091006-img
\ndrwx—— 2 era root 4.0K 2009-10-06 17:35 4GB-part_901-1_spare_091006-img<\/p>\n

.\/16GB_part-901-1_091006-img:
\ntotal 1006M
\n-rwx—— 1 era root\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 4 2009-10-06 17:45 disk
\n-rwx—— 1 era root 9.4K 2009-10-06 17:45 Info-dmi.txt
\n-rwx—— 1 era root\u00a0 20K 2009-10-06 17:45 Info-lshw.txt
\n-rwx—— 1 era root\u00a0 287 2009-10-06 17:45 Info-packages.txt
\n-rwx—— 1 era root\u00a0\u00a0 10 2009-10-06 17:45 parts
\n-rwx—— 1 era root 860M 2009-10-06 17:44 sdb1.ext3-ptcl-img.gz.aa
\n-rwx—— 1 era root 146M 2009-10-06 17:45 sdb5.ext3-ptcl-img.gz.aa
\n-rwx—— 1 era root\u00a0\u00a0 36 2009-10-06 17:40 sdb-chs.sf
\n-rwx—— 1 era root\u00a0 31K 2009-10-06 17:40 sdb-hidden-data-after-mbr
\n-rwx—— 1 era root\u00a0 512 2009-10-06 17:40 sdb-mbr
\n-rwx—— 1 era root\u00a0 476 2009-10-06 17:40 sdb-pt.parted
\n-rwx—— 1 era root\u00a0 351 2009-10-06 17:40 sdb-pt.sf
\n-rwx—— 1 era root\u00a0\u00a0 53 2009-10-06 17:45 swappt-sdb6.info<\/p>\n

.\/4GB-part_901-1_spare_091006-img:
\ntotal 640M
\n-rwx—— 1 era root\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 4 2009-10-06 17:35 disk
\n-rwx—— 1 era root 9.4K 2009-10-06 17:35 Info-dmi.txt
\n-rwx—— 1 era root\u00a0 20K 2009-10-06 17:35 Info-lshw.txt
\n-rwx—— 1 era root\u00a0 287 2009-10-06 17:35 Info-packages.txt
\n-rwx—— 1 era root\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 5 2009-10-06 17:35 parts
\n-rwx—— 1 era root 640M 2009-10-06 17:35 sda1.ext3-ptcl-img.gz.aa
\n-rwx—— 1 era root\u00a0\u00a0 35 2009-10-06 17:32 sda-chs.sf
\n-rwx—— 1 era root\u00a0 31K 2009-10-06 17:32 sda-hidden-data-after-mbr
\n-rwx—— 1 era root\u00a0 512 2009-10-06 17:32 sda-mbr
\n-rwx—— 1 era root\u00a0 251 2009-10-06 17:32 sda-pt.parted
\n-rwx—— 1 era root\u00a0 259 2009-10-06 17:32 sda-pt.sf<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Once our netbooks have their operating systems and software installed on them, when they’ve been tested and tinkered with, it’d be a shame to have to do all that again without good reason. To avoid wasting time in the future, it makes sense to back-up the whole system whilst it’s nice and tidy, so if […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21,5],"tags":[3,29,28,30],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/projects.kmi.open.ac.uk\/era\/vowlan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/projects.kmi.open.ac.uk\/era\/vowlan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/projects.kmi.open.ac.uk\/era\/vowlan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/projects.kmi.open.ac.uk\/era\/vowlan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/projects.kmi.open.ac.uk\/era\/vowlan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=222"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/projects.kmi.open.ac.uk\/era\/vowlan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":239,"href":"http:\/\/projects.kmi.open.ac.uk\/era\/vowlan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222\/revisions\/239"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/projects.kmi.open.ac.uk\/era\/vowlan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=222"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/projects.kmi.open.ac.uk\/era\/vowlan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=222"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/projects.kmi.open.ac.uk\/era\/vowlan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=222"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}