swapping the disk, with the operating system, using a clone made with CLONEZILLA

[Chris Murphy]

On Tue, Jan 20, 2015 at 11:40 PM, Angelo Moreschini
<mrangelo.fedora at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
>
> I already used successfully clonezilla to backup my OS (fedora).
>
> I did this (only for exercise til now) restoring the OS on the original disk
> from which I had take the clone.
>
> Now I wanted to use my clone to restore fedora on a virgin HD. (for security
> reasons, I did not want restore the clone on the disk with the OS which I
> use currently).
>
> In this case, however, the operation failed.

The clone operation failed? With what error message?


> That is why, I ask if restoring of a clone (made with clonezilla) can be
> carried out, in general, on any (virgin) HD.

http://clonezilla.org/

Limitations:
The destination partition must be equal or larger than the source one.
Online imaging/cloning is not implemented yet. The partition to be
imaged or cloned has to be unmounted.


Maybe one of those is related. I can't tell whether you cloned the
entire drive, or just a partition. I also don't know how clonezilla
works, if it does file copies or if it's a sector copy to something
like a sparsefile. If a whole drive clone is basically a dd or
ddrescue sort of thing, then it ought to just work even if you go to a
larger sized drive. The one small problem is if the drive has a GPT
partition scheme, the backup GPT needs relocation if the new drive has
a different number of sectors (even by 1 sector).

Another possible issue is if the original (source) is not 4096 byte
aligned but the new drive has 4096 physical sectors, then special
handling is necessary or you'll get bad performance. I don't know if
clonezilla knows this. It might know special handling is needed, but
can't do it, so it fails.


-- 
Chris Murphy