On 2012-11-26 21:28, Andrew Greig wrote:

Hi all,

I have 2 x identical Lenovo IdeaPads each 160Gb storage. I have downloaded and burned the CD iso of Clonezilla. I set up the source with a fixed IP of 192.168.0.44 and the target with 192.168.0.55 have CloneZilla running on each machine and ran the command line as root ocs-onthefly -s 192.168.0.44 -t sda from the receiving machine.

The clone failed with the line "Failed to create the partition table on the target device: /dev/sda ! Program terminated !!" I have Googled for help and tried blitzing the MBR.

I could try blitzing the whole target drive, ie delete the partions already present. Would that be helpful?

I've not used CloneZilla before, but if you've only got to do this once, I'd probably just do it with dd and netcat: srcHost$ dd if=/dev/sda | nc -l -p 1234 dstHost$ nc srcHost 1234 | dd of=/dev/sda And optionally write a while loop on each host to send a USR1 to dd to get transfer statistics (data rate and quantity) at regular intervals: srcHost$ while pkill -USR1 ^dd; do sleep 10; done dstHost$ while pkill -USR1 ^dd; do sleep 10; done You could also put a 'pv' command in the mix to get an ETA and such. When I tried this (not using block devices; just regular files) it didn't stop when it hit the end of the file; it just sat there. This shouldn't be a problem though; just confirm that both dds have read/written the same number of bytes, and you should be fine to kill it. -- Regards, Matthew Cengia

On Mon, 2012-11-26 at 21:44 +1100, Russell Coker wrote:

On Mon, 26 Nov 2012, Andrew Greig <pushin.linux@gmail.com> wrote:

...

I have 2 x identical Lenovo IdeaPads each 160Gb storage.

Are the drives identical? If they aren't does the target of the clone operation have a disk that is bigger than the source or which is bigger than the used part of the source?

If so then you don't need to worry about partition tables etc, just copy the raw data from the disk. You can do that safely by booting both systems from a recovery CD or USB stick. You can even copy the raw disk if the source is running in multi-user mode as long as there are few disk writes in progress and you run fsck on the target afterwards.

Thanks Russell, Matthew and Michael, It's amazing the things that can trip one up. Both machines were running WiFi networking so I decided to see how it would go with an ethernet cable connection instead. I started Clonezilla in the source machine with a USB DVD drive and the CZ disc, when it was in standby I disconnected the drive and used it to boot the target drive. With both machines on ethernet cable it is swinging along nicely. Just as well that I remembered to run them both on 240v. I am pretty sure the batteries would have expired during this process. Thanks for your support. I will report on the success of the exercise, tomorrow. Andrew Greig

Assuming you're dealing with a POSIX-style filesystem. If you're cloning a Windows installation, for example, this is unlikely to work. In that case though, I recommend investigating ntfsclone (part of the ntfsprogs package on Debian). AIUI it only copies the populated parts of the ntfs data without messing with it too much. Jason White <jason@jasonjgw.net> wrote:

Matthew Cengia <mattcen@gmail.com> wrote:

...

I've not used CloneZilla before, but if you've only got to do this once, I'd probably just do it with dd and netcat:

If you don't mind creating partitions you can do it more efficiently with rsync by running a live distribution from a CD/DVD/USB device on the destination machine, allowing an ssh connection to be established. Then create the partitions and file systems, mount them and use rsync to transfer the files across.

I've done this for backup. Instead of excluding, e.g., /proc and /sys, I just bind mount the actual file systems on the machine to be backed up, then run rsync.

It's a little more work than copying the drives themselves, but it only copies actual files and you don't have to reboot the system to be copied. File modes and ownership are preserved by the -a option to rsync.

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Michael Lindner writes:

Clonezilla has "smarts" to try not to copy empty space etc. Good if you are going to do many.

Stick an lzop or gzip --fast -c in the pipeline, and it'll run-length empty space (i.e. zeroes). Of course, unallocated filesystem blocks and partition blocks probably aren't all zeroes on a used disk, but when you start down that road, you get to the point where you simply manually make the partitions and filesystems on the far end, and copy just the files using rsync.

Could you just remove the target drive and put it in a usb dock?

+1 for target SCSI mode ;-)

On Tue, 27 Nov 2012, Jason White <jason@jasonjgw.net> wrote:

It's a little more work than copying the drives themselves, but it only copies actual files and you don't have to reboot the system to be copied. File modes and ownership are preserved by the -a option to rsync.

Also use --numeric-ids for that sort of thing. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/

Andrew Greig <pushin.linux@gmail.com> wrote:

I have a working WinXP in sda1 and a working Mandriva install in sda5 (swap) and sda6 (everything else). The partition table cannot be read but GRUB works. I still have 60Gb of emty space which I would like to turn into a /home directory and move the home based files across, but the partition table is corrupted (something about a missing "magic number") and the Mandriva partitioning tool will not allow me to add another partition.

Try GNU Parted instead, which appears to be the most sophisticated partition handling tool.