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 Forum index » House Training » Beginners Help ( Start Here)
Cloning my drive
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rmcellig

Joined: 19 Nov 2011
Posts: 734
Location: Ottawa Ontario Canada
PostPosted: Sun 22 Apr 2012, 18:08    Post subject:  Cloning my drive  
The drive I have puppy on at the moment is formatted NTFS because my wife is using Windows XP Pro. It looks like there are directory problems with the drive so I was thinking of cloning the drive to my external USB drive, and then reformatting the main drive sda1 as NTFS with a partition formatted for Linux so that I can put Puppy and maybe another Linux distro on it.

Is there a tool in Puppy that will allow me to clone the drive or do I have to use Clonezilla?

What are my options? I want to make sure that all her stuff is safe and that recovering it so that I don't have to reinstall XP Pro is possible.

Thanks!!
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rcrsn51


Joined: 05 Sep 2006
Posts: 7756
Location: Stratford, Ontario
PostPosted: Sun 22 Apr 2012, 20:00    Post subject:  
What is your intent? To backup the Windows partition to a USB drive, reformat the drive with a smaller NTFS partition and a Linux partition, then copy the Windows image back?

Cloning software usually won't restore an image into a partition that's smaller than the original.

Quote:
I want to make sure that all her stuff is safe and that recovering it so that I don't have to reinstall XP Pro is possible.


??????

BTW, you never finished off your thread here.
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rmcellig

Joined: 19 Nov 2011
Posts: 734
Location: Ottawa Ontario Canada
PostPosted: Sun 22 Apr 2012, 21:10    Post subject:  
Yes exactly. The entire drive is formatted as NTFS even though the windows installation takes up about 70GB in size. Actually what I could do is clone the drive to an external drive. Reformat the original drive as NTFS, restore the clone and after I do all that use Gparted from puppy to partion the drive with a Linux ext4 partition. Make sense?
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mahaju


Joined: 11 Oct 2010
Posts: 455
Location: between the keyboard and the chair
PostPosted: Sun 22 Apr 2012, 22:40    Post subject:  
rcrsn51 wrote:
...

Cloning software usually won't restore an image into a partition that's smaller than the original.
...


Make a backup of your current configuration
How much space is needed for Windows system right now?
Is that really 70 GB or 7GB?
in any case, after you have a backup image, format your hard drive, then make partitions BEFORE installing the OS or restoring back the image (if I understand you correctly you want to restore your image first then make partitions for puppy). Make sure that the partition for Windows is at least equal to or 1-2 GB larger than what it was before
After partitioning is finished restore the image to the partition that you want to make the Windows partition
You can later format the remaining partition into other file systems using any tool available, like gparted
These are just the general steps I would have taken
However I have only worked with cloning using Norton Ghost and Windows so I cannot give details about Linux based cloning software , but I suppose the general method is the same
In any case, you should first make the appropriate partitions and then restore the image instead of the other way round
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Peterm321

Joined: 29 Jan 2009
Posts: 196
PostPosted: Mon 23 Apr 2012, 02:24    Post subject:  
mahaju wrote:

rcrsn51 wrote:
...

Cloning software usually won't restore an image into a partition that's smaller than the original.
...

Make a backup of your current configuration
How much space is needed for Windows system right now?
Is that really 70 GB or 7GB?



I have recently had need to restore Windows XP (home). Mind you the NTFS partition is less than 2 GB, I prefer to use the Windows ext2fsmgr ext2 driver and keep large programs and data on an Ext2 partition, rather than the NTFS one(appears to be a little faster & less hassle with permissions etc).

I would echo the previous contributors and advise backing up the existing NTFS partition thoroughly before doing anything more.

Once you have backed up, it may be possible to defrag and use gparted to reduce the NTFS partition size and then make an additional backup. This is what my line of thinking is if I wanted to replace a single large NTFS partition with a smaller NTFS partition:

( 1 ) backup(clone) all the existing hard drive. (It wouldnt hurt to make 2 backups actually)

( 2 ) Make sure you have a hard copy of the output of the linux command
"fdisk -l" (lists your existing partition information, you may need if things go wrong).

( 3 ) Go into XP and defrag.

( 4 ) Call up gparted and see if you can reduce the NTFS partition size.

( 5 ) if (4) works, then you should be able to add one or more ext2 or ext4 or whatever type you want partitions.

( 6 ) Reboot XP, try the repair option on the Install CD if it wont boot.

( 7 ) If ( 6 ) works, then you can separately backup the now smaller NTFS partition.

( 8 ) You can consider installing a multibooter like grub if you want multi booting facility.

I used the commandline utility, ntfsclone, to make my backup in the first place and used it to restore. Now I should report that when I first restored the NTFS partition, XP refused to boot. I tried testdisk and ms-sys to no avail. I ended up booting the XP install CD and using the repair existing install option and that solved the problem. ntfsclone appears to have perfectly restored the filesystem, I think it was something to do with the XP booting records maybe it was a security matter. But it doesnt hurt to keep the XP CD close at hand in any event.

I had previously used gparted to resize smaller the existing NTFS partition and added an ext2 partition without XP complaining.

If you can I would try and see if the NTFS XP partition can be made under 4GB, that way it can be backed up to a DVD.

System rescue CD is worth a look, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_rescue_cd

It has an up to date kernel, gparted, and other utilties on it for backing up and changing partitions.
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