Hard disk upgrading with Clonezilla

Some time ago my desktop computer welcomed me with an unpleasant message: the main hard drive was likely to fail soon.

When you receive similar messages you never know how soon “soon” means. Since disk drives prices are reasonably low I decided not to waste time, I so bought a new, bigger, hard drive to replace the faulty one.

Upgrading the computer main drive could be a time consuming business if done “by hand” since it means copying all system and user data. Fortunately many tools exist in the Linux world to ease the process, among them Clonezilla.

Clonezilla

Clonezilla is a, very small foot-print, Linux distribution dedicated to disk and partition backup or cloning. I already used it once to backup EEEPC original Xandros installation. I downloaded Clonezilla ISO image and installed it on a SUB disk using Unetbootin. Because of its very small size I’ve been able to install Clonezilla on a old 1GB USB drive.

Before starting Clonezilla Iinstalled the new drive on my desktop PC together with the old one and partitioned it using Gparted.

At boot Clonezilla offer some boot options, I selected the default one

Then, once the system had started, after the long language and keyboard selection menu, I’ve been shown several options. I selected to work in a “device-device” mode then selected the “local partition-to-local partition” copy mode.

I proceeded with copying partition one from the old disk to partition one in the new disk, once completed I repeated with partition two.

At last I powered of the computer, removed the old faulty disk and left the new one in its place. I restarted the system but, the new disk didn’t boot.

After a while I figured I forgot that Clonezilla, when copying partition-by-partition, didn’t copy boot information. Not a big deal, once you understand it.

Eventually I started again the system using Clonezilla and, using command line interface, I installed GRUB on the new disk.

sudo mkdir /mnt/ubuntu
sudo mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/ubuntu
sudo grub-install --boot-directory=/mnt/ubuntu/boot /dev/sda

After this my computer started, working like before.

By the Way now I have a unreliable spare 500 GB hard disk, what could I use it for?

Backing-up the EEEPC with Clonezilla

I'm going to install EEEBuntu to but first I decided to back-up my current installation. I decided to use Clonezilla, the 'live' distribution, mainly because it promised to be a clean and fast tool.
I used one 1GB USB pen drive as boot device and an external 250GB USB hard drive as backup device.
I first downloaded Clonezilla, the zip format distribution, (from here) and uncompressed it to my USB pen drive. Then, following instructions from Clonezilla site,  I made my USB drive bootable using Live USB Helper.
I then started my EEEPC from the usb drive, by pressing  ESC key at boot time and choosing the pen drive from the boot menu.
I proceeced with backup operation following Clonezilla site instructions (here). No screenshots, sorry, but there is no real difference between what I did and screenshots published in Clonezilla how to pagesThe only real difference is the disk naming: on the EEEPC internal disks are usually named "sda" and "sdb" while external disk names may change (in this case it was "sdc").
Here are my selections, in the order they appeared:

• "Clonezilla Live (Default settings, VGA 800x600)" in boot menu options
• Language: "English" (Italian is also available)
• Keymap: first 'qwerty' then 'italian' and 'standard'
• "Start_Clonezilla" option
• Mode: "device-image" to backup source diskto an image fale in destination disk
• Mode: "local_dev" to select a local device (the usb external drive) as target device
• Destination device: "sdc1" this is the name given to my external drive and mounted by Clonezilla as "/home/partimag"
• Backup directory: "Top_directory_in_the_local_device"
• Mode: "savedisk" to save the whole EEEPC disk to an image
• Image name: "2009-02-05-23-img" the default name
• Source disks: "sda" and "sdb"
• Clone programs priority: "-q : ntfsclone > partimage > dd" 
• Advanced extra parameters: none changed from default
• Compression: "-z1 Use gzip compression"
• Split size: "0" EEEPC (disks are small so why to split the image?)
• Action after cloning: "true do nothing"

In conclusion I think Clonezilla is really a valuable fast and clean tool. It took only 15 minutes to backup my EEEPC disks (not very full indeed) to an image a little bigger than 3GB. Clonezilla interface may seem a little primitive but, while using it, I never felt the need of a more complex one. So I, definitely, have no escuses for not to backup my system at least before any major upgrade.