Windows 7: Clonezilla Open-Source Image Backup

In the first place, your English is not that bad, and since my German only consists of a few phrases I am both jealous of you and admire you for knowing two languages when I do not.

We at Windows Seven Forums (and Eight Forums and Vista Forums) are just here to help if we can, but your thanks is appreciated.

The simple answer to your two questions above is yes, the image should restore to a larger than 500 GB hard drive. And you should be able to select only the OS partition to restore ie: sdb2.

I would say you have several options and although it may seem like a lot of work, you have the chance to practice using this software (and other software options if you wish) when it is not at a critical time. So you can do so safely without the danger of losing your data, teach yourself, and have experience when there is a critical time and you need to save your data.

The first option that comes to mind is to restore the image you created to the hard drive it came from. That means you need to move the OS that is there now to another location. So you could do as I suggested earlier and shrink the Windows 7 partition, make your image, and restore it to the third hard drive. Make sure the OS is working completely so you will not lose any data before restoring the original image you made to the hard drive it came from. Once that OS (the fresh one) is working OK you can shrink the Windows 7 partition and make a new smaller image of your "fresh" OS that will restore easier.

Second, you can move the files the image made from the second hard drive, the backup, to the first hard drive, either to the C: drive or create a small partition that will hold the files temporarily. Once the backup hard drive is empty, you can try to restore the image to the backup hard drive. If it is identical to the original hard drive you imaged, you should be able to restore the image there and have your "fresh" OS to work with.



Having three hard drives is very nice and makes it easier to move stuff around to finally get it the way you want. Use them to your advantage! Now if you have two identical OSs on two hard drives, you will not be able to access both at the same time. You must boot to the hard drive that has the OS you want to work with. You can change this behavior by having Windows create the "dual boot" configuration. If you simply wish to experiment with 7, then you do not need the dual boot, but that is up to you.

Cheers!

Robert

Thank you very much Robert. Your answer is perfect.

Because of my Girlfriend my time is always very short with my PC

but i will try the things you suggested.

There are not very important data on the Harddisk, but i was a lot of work to set up the PC like i want it.

Alright again thank you very much for your help.

btw very nice forum

greets Marcel

Alright i solved the problem like this:

Thank you very much for your help, hope to see you soon in this oder theeightsforum nice greets from Austria sony

That is great news! Glad you found a solution that worked for you. Yes, I saw you at The Eight Forums. Not much happening there as we are just laying the groundwork for the next Windows OS. But when the 8 Beta is released, we will be waiting at the door for our copy!! See you there.

Robert

I have a few questions about selecting partitions... OK first I have two hard drives one sata and an old IDE for back up image. When selecting primary sata HDD witch is partition into 3 show up as sdb1,2,3,4 and the IDE HDD as sda1. Shouldn't the sata HDD be sda and the IDE be sdb? Also do I have to back up the small 105mb partition with the main OS? I did a back up with of my OS and software install and the back up image came out to 14gb, does that sound about right with the compressing clonezilla uses?

btw nice tutoriat!

raiderkeek7; Thank you for your kind words!

The position of the hard drives, ie sda, sdb, is controlled by the motherboard and the bios. For example if you remove the old IDE drive, the SATA drive would most likely be positioned as sda. For whatever reason, when you add the IDE drive, the BIOS puts it before the SATA drive making it sda.

The 100MB partition is not essential. That said, 7 has been designed to use this feature and creates the 100MB partition during installation. Including it when you save your drive image makes restoration easier. If you need to, you can use the install DVD, install a fresh 7, and then restore the drive image you saved. Accomplishes the same thing with a little more work.

14GB seems to be about right for a new 7 installation including other programs.

Thanks again!
Robert

I use Clonezilla to clone my drives once a week. If anything happens I have a back up. Just plug and go.

belikexp;

Thanks for the input. Clonezilla is so easy to use, yet few can be bothered with backing up their data.

Just curious: Where do you put your backup file? How do you manage your weekly files?

Happy surfing!
Robert

As an update to this thread, I have received my retail copy of 7 Home Premium, installed it on my Dell 505 laptop (least used and smallest data size), backed up with both Clonezilla and the 7 backup utility, and restored successfully with both methods. So I have no worries if I ever find myself needing to reinstall my 7 upgrade.

My upgrade (both the download from MS and the retail box) would not activate unless I started the upgrade from my activated 7 RC, as expected. I could even delete the 7 partitions and reinstall fresh as long as I started the upgrade in Windows.

Restoration was flawless, however I am having issues copying/moving the 7 backup and image (not the clonezilla image) to a different location. Not sure what that is about. As soon as I get my external USB hard drive setup, I plan to save the Windows backup externally.

Cheers to all!
Robert

I have been using Clonezilla regularly for a while now for my XP machines and its worked great. I have been working in the IT field for 5 years or so and over this time friends and family have found out that they can get cheap PC help/repair out of me. My question about Clonezilla is this, if I create an image of say an XP media center edition version of windows on a Gateway laptop. Is it possible to restore that image to a separate say Dell inspiron laptop. I'm just trying to find a more efficient way of reloading friends laptops rather than reformatting the HD and starting with a barebone installation, applying updates, install freeware application and so on.

Thanks,