Clonezilla cloning 13Gb win7 installation on 120Gb with no partitions?

Tango1 · 12 Jan 2014

I am new to cloning drives and am a bit confused.

My current SSD is 120Gb with no partitions and has a freshly Windows7 installed.

If I use Clonezilla to clone this Windows 7 installation, I would only get the option to image the entire drive or partitions on it this drive right? But in my case the 120Gb disk has no partitions. So if I use Clonezilla it will copy also the 113Gb empty space but only save the data-part (windows installation) to the result image, which would roughly be 13Gb. Am I right?. So I could cram this "120Gb image"to a 16Gb usb-stick for backup. Is this correct?

Second question: If I were to restore the image to the same 120 Gb drive again there would be no problem whatever the case (no brainer). I understand. But what if I should decide to put this image back not to my current 120Gb drive but to a smaller 64Gb SSD. (because I want to clone my current Windows7 installation on this 120Gb SSD, to a smaller 64Gb SSD), Will the image restore fail?

I just want Clonezilla to image my Windows 7 installation part of my current 120 SSD. Which is about 13Gb, not the whole SSD disk of 120Gb including 117Gb empty space. What should I do.

I don't like to make partitions btw (I will if I have to though) because I have never done this before. Afraid it could split data between partitions in the process (don't know if that is possible at all but just precautious before someone says duh ofcourse it does split the data you are spliiting the drive are you not and data can be scattered across the disk!).

Thanks.

Kaktussoft · 12 Jan 2014

The SSD has win7 installation on it. WIN7 (called C ) is a partition!!
You better use Macrium Reflect or win7 builtin system image backup.

clonezilla is a universal clone/backup tool. Not special for NTFS disks and win7. It doesn't adjust the bootmenu on restore (startup repair will fix that afterwards). It doesn't adjust the drive letters on restore. (automatically fixed if you boot once with clone with source HDD detached from system).

Tango1 · 12 Jan 2014

I will have to to "shrink" my windows partition from 120Gb down to say 20Gb is this true?

Will Clonezilla take into account the 4k boundaries upon restore?

Windows usually puts the pagefile in front of the hdd/sdd. What happen sif I cvlone a windows drive without the pagefile. And then retore this image to a drive. Will it create the same empty space in the area where the pagefile was?

Kaktussoft · 13 Jan 2014

Tango1 said:

I will have to to "shrink" my windows partition from 120Gb down to say 20Gb is this true?

Will Clonezilla take into account the 4k boundaries upon restore?

Windows usually puts the pagefile in front of the hdd/sdd. What happen sif I cvlone a windows drive without the pagefile. And then retore this image to a drive. Will it create the same empty space in the area where the pagefile was?

Don't use clonezilla for such tasks!

Technology of Today - Thoughts & Exploration: Using Clonezilla to Clone From a Larger Hard Drive to a Smaller Drive

Why Clonezilla can _NOT_ image from a large drive to a smaller drive? Any workaround?It's not easy to implement such a feature, since Clonezilla now is a partition "imaging" tool, by "imaging", it means clonezilla actually does not know the files themself, clonezilla just knows where the used blocks are. Because of this reason, the target partiton size must be equal or larger than the original one so that clonezilla can restore the used blocks on that partition. If the target partitioin size is smaller, then it will go wrong.
Unless Clonezilla has file-based function in the future. Maybe...

I am trying to restore an image of a 300 Gb drive (with 30 Gb of data) onto a 250 Gb drive, but it gives me an error that the output drive partition doesn't have enough space to fit the image. Is there any way to restore it anyway?No. Clonezilla is an image-based program, which means the target partition size must be equal or larger than the original one.
However, it's can be done by using GParted (especially GParted live) to resize the source partition, then use Clonezilla to clone partition (not clone disk, i.e. use the option "restoreparts". That also means you have to manually create the partition table on the target disk, and the target partition size must be equal or larger than the source parition). Remember to backup important data before you resize a partition.

Tango1 · 14 Jan 2014

I worked it out. tried moving files out of the way blocking the shirnk-process. My install partition is now shrinked and backed up using clonezilla. Without defragging the SSD.