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dataking
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PostPosted: Wed Jan 08, 2014 8:38 am    Post subject: Disk Clone Options? Reply with quote

This is probably a general linux question, as much as it is a gentoo question, so hopethis is the right place to post it.

I have an older laptop that I've loaded with gentoo and am so far, fairly happy with the installation itself and all of the packages I have installed. Everything seems to work great (for the most part) and I don't want to change what I have going on, and I don't want to have to reinstall gentoo and all the packages I currently have installed.

My issue if that the harddrive that came with the laptop is only 40GB. And while that's enough to "work with", I'd prefer a little more "elbow room" on the disk. I only have 1 disk port available, so that means that I need to "clone" the existing 40GB disk to whatever new disk I buy.

So, what's the best way to "clone" the existing disk onto a new disk, including grub data, etc., and be able to use the entire space of the new disk (say 250-500GB SATA/IDE)?
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i92guboj
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PostPosted: Wed Jan 08, 2014 8:53 am    Post subject: Re: Disk Clone Options? Reply with quote

dataking wrote:
This is probably a general linux question, as much as it is a gentoo question, so hopethis is the right place to post it.

I have an older laptop that I've loaded with gentoo and am so far, fairly happy with the installation itself and all of the packages I have installed. Everything seems to work great (for the most part) and I don't want to change what I have going on, and I don't want to have to reinstall gentoo and all the packages I currently have installed.

My issue if that the harddrive that came with the laptop is only 40GB. And while that's enough to "work with", I'd prefer a little more "elbow room" on the disk. I only have 1 disk port available, so that means that I need to "clone" the existing 40GB disk to whatever new disk I buy.

So, what's the best way to "clone" the existing disk onto a new disk, including grub data, etc., and be able to use the entire space of the new disk (say 250-500GB SATA/IDE)?


You'll need either a way to connect the new disk to your laptop, or a temporary space to clone the disk image, and then dump it to the new disk in another computer.

To clone a block device in Linux you use 'dd'. For example, to clone a whole disk as is 1:1 you do this:

Code:
dd if=/dev/sda of=/mnt/whatever_media/sda.img


To clone just a partition you'd use if=/dev/sda1 instead. You probably want to clone the disk, so that the boot record is also copied. Then, you can dump it back in place using

Code:
dd if=/mnt/whatever_media/sda.img of=/dev/sdX


Being sdX the device node that points to the new drive.

Of course, this will leave empty space after the existing partitions in the new drive. You can use a gparted livecd or something similar to expand the partitions or create new ones that you can later mount at /home or wherever you want.

Another way would be to just backup the existing data, which will produce a probably much smaller result. After that, all you would need to restore would be a livecd, from where you can recreate the partition layout as you wish, then un-tar the backup, and finally adjust fstab and re-install grub or whatever bootloader you use. You need to be careful when copying, and make sure that you preserve permissions and ownership of the files.

Either way will work just as well.
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hadrons123
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PostPosted: Wed Jan 08, 2014 1:14 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

@OP.
please use clonezilla live CD image. Its easy with a GUI menu available to backup the disk which ever way you would want.
I use it on a daily basis multiple times. Never fails.
http://downloads.sourceforge.net/clonezilla/clonezilla-live-2.2.1-22-amd64.iso
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djdunn
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PostPosted: Fri Jan 17, 2014 6:24 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

can always get a usb 3.0 to SATA adapter,

just plug the drive into one end plug into usb and go
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NeddySeagoon
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PostPosted: Fri Jan 17, 2014 10:10 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

dataking,

You don't want to clone the disk, you want to clone the filesysems it contains, which is not the same thing.
dd will make a disc image, which will include all the empty file system space too, so your clone will be 40G.

You can use tar to make a copy of the file systems, so empty space is not saved.
tar has the advantage of not imposing the low level device layout on your new drive.
Before you untar the files in their new home you need to partition and format the new drive.
It need not be identical to the old drive.

You will need to reinstall grub to the MBR of the new drive as grub uses space outside of any filesystem, so this is not saved by tar.
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wjb
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PostPosted: Sat Jan 18, 2014 12:53 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

What hadrons123 said.

This is a listing of an image created by clonezilla:
Code:

disk                       sda2.ext4-ptcl-img.gz.aa  sda8.ntfs-ptcl-img.gz.af
Info-dmi.txt               sda2.ext4-ptcl-img.gz.ab  sda8.ntfs-ptcl-img.gz.ag
Info-lshw.txt              sda4.ext4-ptcl-img.gz.aa  sda8.ntfs-ptcl-img.gz.ah
Info-lspci.txt             sda4.ext4-ptcl-img.gz.ab  sda8.ntfs-ptcl-img.gz.ai
Info-packages.txt          sda4.ext4-ptcl-img.gz.ac  sda9.ext4-ptcl-img.gz.aa
parts                      sda4.ext4-ptcl-img.gz.ad  sda9.ext4-ptcl-img.gz.ab
sda10.ext3-ptcl-img.gz.aa  sda4.ext4-ptcl-img.gz.ae  sda9.ext4-ptcl-img.gz.ac
sda1.ntfs-ptcl-img.gz.aa   sda4.ext4-ptcl-img.gz.af  sda9.ext4-ptcl-img.gz.ad
sda1.ntfs-ptcl-img.gz.ab   sda5.ext4-ptcl-img.gz.aa  sda9.ext4-ptcl-img.gz.ae
sda1.ntfs-ptcl-img.gz.ac   sda5.ext4-ptcl-img.gz.ab  sda-chs.sf
sda1.ntfs-ptcl-img.gz.ad   sda5.ext4-ptcl-img.gz.ac  sda-hidden-data-after-mbr
sda1.ntfs-ptcl-img.gz.ae   sda7.ext2-ptcl-img.gz.aa  sda-mbr
sda1.ntfs-ptcl-img.gz.af   sda8.ntfs-ptcl-img.gz.aa  sda-pt.parted
sda1.ntfs-ptcl-img.gz.ag   sda8.ntfs-ptcl-img.gz.ab  sda-pt.sf
sda1.ntfs-ptcl-img.gz.ah   sda8.ntfs-ptcl-img.gz.ac  swappt-sda6.info
sda1.ntfs-ptcl-img.gz.ai   sda8.ntfs-ptcl-img.gz.ad
sda1.ntfs-ptcl-img.gz.aj   sda8.ntfs-ptcl-img.gz.ae

i.e. It has enough information to be very flexible for the restore - with a bigger disk you can create the new partitions before you start, let it scale the partions in proportion, or just leave the extra space unallocated (and deal with it manually).
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