Cloning Hard Drive

FredGSanford · 08-24-2008, 01:03 PM

I currently have a 160gb hard drive with Win Vista, Debian Lenny and Mandriva One on three partitions. I would like to clone each one separately and reformat my drive and restore them back.

I've used Partimage in the past but one problem with it is I can't get the full partition size for Vista when I restore it. For linux I can use Resize2FS

Does anyone know of a cloning or any program that I can restore Windows and get the full partition size once restored?

Thnx.

PatrickNew · 08-24-2008, 02:16 PM

Well, dd will work, but is far from your best option. I thought that recent versions of GNU Parted could resize NTFS partitions. Can you restore Vista, then resize with that? Or perhaps with the Vista disk (assuming you have one).

FredGSanford · 08-25-2008, 03:26 AM

I'll look into resizing with GParted and the Vista disc. Thanks for the reply.

/bin/bash · 08-25-2008, 07:38 AM

I just posted this in another thread.
CloneZilla-Live
You can put it on a CD or USB thumb drive, directions at clonezilla.org.

FredGSanford · 08-26-2008, 10:32 AM

/bin/bash, but will it restore the windows ntfs back to the hard drive and I will get full size of the partition? Using Partimage will restore it but does not give it the full size of partition.

Thnx.

/bin/bash · 08-28-2008, 05:37 AM

Yes it will restore to any partition you choose as long as it is big enough to hold the files. The nice thing about clonezilla is that it doesn't just copy the partition byte for byte, it does a smart copy of only the used space.

As for the partition not being the right size you can fix that with fdisk.