LM disk image

[selukwe]

Is it possible to transfer/copy my LM13KDE partition to another disk? In Windows, this would be possible using e.g. Acronis True Image boot disk - making a backup of the old disk and restoring it on the new disk. Can this be safely done also with a Linux system? Would it boot normally? Ideas and tips on this would be most welcome.

[viking777]

This is what I use:

http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.p ... fsarchiver

There are others.

[selukwe]

OK, thanks. This is encouraging. But there´s more to it. As they say, the devil is in the details...:

I have my LM13KDE on a USD disk and when I was installing it, the installer offered setting aside:
1) the first partition (with FAT32 filesystem which is freely accessible as a data storage - by both Linux as well as Windows)
2) next as the second partion Linus OS has been installed and then also
3) the third partion was created for the swap file.

If I get it correctly, for my cloning to work, I would have to newly install LM13KDE from the bootable installation ISO to my new disk (just to have the disk properly partinioned, prepared and made duly bootable) and next restore my image on the second partion (as primary, or logical? - probably logical as the boot data would already be there... - but I may be wrong). Would this work? And would it also work if the new "second" partition would be of different size (obviously not smaller than the size of data on the image)? If all this has been done, would it work normally?

[viking777]

Ah I see, whole disk cloning is what you want not partition imaging. The alternatives are

Code: Select all

sudo dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=4096 conv=notrunc,noerror

Which will clone the entire disk sda to sdb including all partitions and the mbr.

And Clonezilla which I used to use before qt4-fsarchiver, it is probably more use for cloning whole disks:

http://clonezilla.org/show-live-doc-con ... disk_clone

I personally have never done whole disk cloning so I can't tell you the details, but as I understand it you do not need to format or install anything it all comes 'over' with the clone.

[selukwe]

But if I skip installing it anew from the ISO in order to be able to determine (and set!) the size of individual partitions, then their previous size would be restored and this is not what I want. Currently, I use 32GB USB disk and I want to move to a 64GB disk. So I would want to increase both the first as well as second partitions while accepting the system-set swap file partition.

I am not skilled in command switches in linux and I would hate destroying my WinXP HDD by mistake... I use bootable Acronis True Image (itself written in linux), which seems to be a pretty good solution to make an image of the second original partition (the one with linux OS) and next restoring it on the new disk as its new second partition.

But should I restore it as primary or logical?

[viking777]

By deafult, Clonezilla will clone the "same" size of source disk to target disk. i.e. in this example, only 8 GB will be cloned to target disk, so 4 GB of disk size on the target disk will be unallocated. If you want to make use all of the target disk size, remember to enter "Expert" mode and choose option "-k1".

In the link I showed you, but if you don't want to do it that way it is up to you. Linux can boot from a primary or a logical partition, it doesn't matter.

[selukwe]

I expect the delivery of my new USB disk in about a week's time. I'll share my experience with the community.