Clonezilla boot cloning

[Bozee89]

I usually use clonezilla to clone my Windows 10 Home 64 bit and it seesms to work great, I usually use the part clone option because I partitioned my HDD into 2 partitions one were is my Windows 10 is installed and the other partitions dedicated for backups to save my clones.

My issue started when I formatted my HDD completely including the boot files, when I restored it back using clonezilla as a partition restore I couldn't boot from my first partition but I can see the content and access my files with no problems by mounting my HDD using any Linux distribution.

I will try to install Windows 10 to get the boot files back to my HDD after that I will restore my backed up Windows 10 clone as a partition restore.

I understood my mistake, I should have backed up my Windows 10 partition AND the boot partition, but how would I clone my boot partition in clonezilla, if I use the diskclone option basically it will clone my whole HDD inuding the backup partition and the boot partition. That is not a solution since I will have no place to save my clones. Any suggestions?

 

[Phillip Corcoran]

In your situation you need to be creating a "disk image" using disk imaging software, instead of cloning disk-to-disk. When creating a disk image, you can include or exclude whichever partitions you wish.

I save disk images for every PC in our household on three external hard drives (same data on all three so I also have backups in case one of those drives should fail).

Some softwares include both disk cloning and disk imaging in the same package. Some are free but I use a paid version of Active@ Disk Image Professional as I've found it to be consistently reliable compared to others I've tried. There are two versions depending on how much you're willing to pay: http://www.disk-image.com/

 

[Bozee89]

Played with Clonezilla for sometime, I tried to do the partition imaging but the problem is when I restored the boot image that I created, I could not boot from the system, insted i reinstalled windows 10 to get the boot files installed in my HDD then I restored my windows partition without restoring the boot files I previously backed up since it's autumatically installed using Windows bootable USB.

This seems not the proper way to do it, I wonder why I could not restore my windows boot partitions.

I haven't tried to do the disk imaging which basically images the whole HDD, I do not have the option the choose what to image in the disk image mode, but again the problem is I have one HDD installed in my laptop and I do not wnat to use external HDD to save my entire internal HDD because USB 2.0 transfer rate is very slow compared to the sata controllers.

What I am going to do next is

1) disk imaging: to image my whole HDD, it's not the best solution but I'll try it anyways.

2) partition image: to image my selected partitions which I tried with the boot files and didn't work as I mentioned earlier. However, I'll try to image the boot files and the windows partition alone together hoping it will work.

 

[Phillip Corcoran]

"I wonder why I could not restore my windows boot partitions"

Yes, you must include the boot partition when creating the image.

"I do not have the option the choose what to image in the disk image mode"

That doesn't sound right to me. When I create a disk image with my software, there are check-boxes for each partition. You choose exactly which partitions you want to include.

"I do not want to use external HDD to save my entire internal HDD because USB 2.0 transfer rate is vety slow"

It only takes 10 minutes for me to create an image of my entire 500GB HDD over USB 2.0 with Active@ Disk Image.
You think that's too slow? That's no longer than it takes to have a cuppa, what's too slow about that?

One last point, saving disk images on the same physical hard drive that contains the source partitions is a very bad idea because when that hard drive fails (and it will one day) you've lost everything including your disk-images. That's why I use external hard drives to save the disk-images on. Saving them on the same hard drive makes the whole exercise kinda pointless.

 

[Bozee89]

"It only takes 10 minutes for me to create an image of my entire 500GB HDD over USB 2.0 with Active@ Disk Image.
You think that's too slow? That's no longer than it takes to have a cuppa, what's too slow about that?"

When I say slow I mean it man it takes around 6 hours to finish the imaging process, as for the internal HDD it takes around 2 hours to restore or image my 150GB of data out of 600GB partition since the imaging software I use compresses and images the used data and not the whole partition or HDD.



"One last point, saving disk images on the same physical hard drive that contains the source partitions is a very bad idea because when that hard drive fails (and it will one day) you've lost everything including your disk-images. That's why I use external hard drives to save the disk-images on. Saving them on the same hard drive makes the whole exercise kinda pointless."

You are indeed right, but after imaging my partition I copy it manually to my external HDD in case my internal HDD crashes, I do not image directly from internal to external because of the slow transfer speed as I mentioned plus i get a alot of error messages while transferring to external source and I have to redo my whole imaging again.

I guess I have to try different imaging software, I'll try the one you suggested.