Clonezilla and Multi-Boot Systems
This past winter break, I decided that a 15″ laptop was too much to take to class everyday, and purchased an HP tx2500z Tablet. Being that this was my second laptop, I decided that there was no need to completely max out all the specs right away, and took the free HP upgrades to 3 gb of RAM and the 250 gb hard drive, and figured I would upgrade them myself later this year. In the meantime, however, I ended up installing UbuntuStudio x64 (20 gb) and Vista Home Premium x64 (180 gb) in a dual boot configuration with the GRUB boot loader, with another 20 gb partition formatted in FAT32 for data, and a final 10 gb reserved for the HP_RECOVERY partition, as it had originally shipped on the computer. I then tweaked and customized each OS as per my liking, and installed all of the software necessary for my classes and for my everyday computing.
About a month ago I found a Seagate 500 gb, 7200 RPM drive on Dell Small Business for ~$100, shipped. After double checking the price on Newegg (which was ~$140 shipped), I decided it was most likely the best deal I would find for the time being, and purchased it. After all the time I had spent setting up the original system, I definitely didn’t want to reinstall both OS’s, reinstall all of my software, and copy all of my files onto this new hard drive. I had previously used Clonezilla on my old laptop when going from a 160 gb to a 320 gb, but that only had a single Vista partition on it. Just to make sure that multiple partitions wouldn’t be an issue, I turned to Google. After some quick searching, with no new information, I now had two options; Norton Ghost, which you have to pay for, and Clonezilla. Considering I had used Clonezilla in the past, I figured it wouldn’t be too hard to use it to copy multiple partitions if they all resided on a single drive. So I fired up the Clonezilla Live CD I had from the previous time, and set up a drive to drive local copy. After about 50%, it froze. I figured I’d give it another shot. About 15 tries later, and no full copies on the new 500 gb drive, I decided to try something different; I downloaded the latest version of Clonezilla (1.2.2-14), burned the iso to a disc, and booted the disc.
It started up with the same splash screen as the previous copy, and after getting to the menu, provided me with the same options. After selecting a disc-to-disc, direct copy, a new GUI showed up. The transfer started, and unlike the previous version I was using, it was using a different copy method. It took roughly 3 hours (I think) to copy the 180 gb partition. It then jumped to the 10 gb Recovery partition, and then the 20 gb FAT32 partition. It started copying the Ext2 partition (Ubuntu), but froze halfway through. Rather than redoing the entire hard drive (which at this point had taken 5 hours, as each file system transferred at different speeds), I swapped the 500 gb into my tablet, and started it up. Vista booted up with no problems, and didn’t even ask for a new activation. I took this as a sign that there was no need to redo any of the other partitions. I took the 500 gb out, and placed the original 250 gb back in so I could figure out how to copy my Ubuntu partition. After reading over all of the Clonezilla menu options, I decided I would image the partition (the entire extended partition, in this case) to an external hard drive, and then restore the image into the partition that had alrady been allocated on the 500 gb. Another 2 hours later, and Ubuntu, including the GRUB boot loader, was restored into the correct location. After swapping the hard drives again, I was able to boot into both operating systems as if the original hard drive was still installed.
After double checking all of my settings, I decided I should actually make use of all the extra space that this new hard drive provided. Given how much Microsoft has improved on their built in disk management software in Vista, I figured this would be my easiest/best way to partition the remaining space. After several failed attempts, I realized that I already had 4 primary partitions on my hard drive (Vista, FAT32, Recovery, Extended). I then bootied into Ubuntu to use gparted to move the partitions around and place the unallocated space in the extended region. However, because Ubuntu was already located in the extended partition, and was currently running, I couldn’t resize/move it. Considering gparted also can be uesd on a Live CD, I then booted from that. After it was all loaded up, I disabled the swap partition, resized the Extended partition to contain the unallocated space, and was finally able to create an NTFS partition to house all of my media. Rather than use FAT32 again, I figured NTFS was a better call so I could save HD movie rips and large software iso images on this new partition.
The final step was to make sure all of my documents and files had “survived” the transfer, and then erase the 250 gb hard drive so it could be used as an external. All of my files in the Vista and Ubuntu partitions were intact, but the FAT32 partition for some reason had empty folders. This was easily solved by copying over the folders from the FAT32 partition on the now enclosed 250 gb hard drive. So, after roughly 2-3 weeks of toiling , I now have a carbon copy of my original drive, with an extra 232 GB of space to serve as a Media drive.
UPDATE: Here’s a step-by-step tutorial to clone your system with Clonezilla.