NeutralAxis

Earlier this month I described how to make an image of a drive in a new computer using Clonezilla.  Today, I reversed the process and restored that image onto a new drive.  This thing looks so dangerous, it might eat children.

I had imaged the drive from my new Gateway EC5801u laptop, which had about 25GB of a 500GB drive in use.  I found a deal on a new 500GB, 2.5″ hard drive and decided to try restoring the image to it and swapping it with the drive in the laptop.

The process was very similar to the imaging process I described.  The departure came here where instead of choosing Savedisk, I chose Restoredisk.

The previous tutorial was done using VirtualBox so I could get screenshots.  Unfortunately, I don’t have anything to restore in VB and I had no way to make screenshots during the actual restore session, so I don’t have shots of the restore screens.  But the next screens for drive mounting choices were the same as had come up during the imaging process.  One problem that required me to start the process over was that after I had made the original image, I had moved it into a deeper nested subfolder.  Clonezilla only looks one level deep on the mounted source drive for the image, so I had to reboot into Ubuntu and move the image back to the top level folder.  After doing that, Clonezilla found the image and proceeded.  Ultimately, I was prompted to choose the destination drive, and that’s where it got scary.

A “WARNING, WARNING, WARNING” message appeared after I choose the destination drive letting me know that if I continued, I’d erase any data already there.  After proceeding, I got another “WARNING, WARNING, WARNING” message asking if I really, really, was super confident that what I was doing was OK.  The only problem with these warning, was that the wording of them, which I don’t have at the moment, wasn’t really so clear.  Rather than say flat out, “You’ve chosen /dev/sdd 500GB Western Digital as the destination drive.  If you continue you’ll delete all data on that drive,” it separated the warning from the drive details, never making it crystal clear that the drive details it was showing were the destination.

All went well though and in about 20 minutes the process was complete with all partitions from the original drive recreated on the new drive.

Next step is to put it in the laptop and see if it works.