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

[Rick Stevens]

On 01/21/2015 12:22 PM, Chris Murphy wrote:
> 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.

We do need more info other than "the clone operation failed". I have
cloned a large number of machines using Clonezilla using virgin drives
(CentOS, Fedora, Ubuntu, Winblows). Many had the target drives larger
than the original. I will say that they all used fdisk-style partition
tables, though (no GPT tables).
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