Cloning/Imaging

[Eklipze3k]

I tried clonezilla but it wouldn't even load, kept coming up with garbled crap when trying to run but - as the SSD is smaller capacity than the original HDD - I don't think it would've worked anyways.
Will try fdisk later, doing some painting and sanding in the kitchen so have got the evening to muck around with this

 

[jenks69]

The suspense is killing me. How did you get on dude?

 

[Eklipze3k]

I haven't yet, will update when I've had a chance to try it.

 

[BlueDan]

Not sure why CloneZilla is doing that on you, maybe try burning another copy? Has worked beautifully for me for several years now, use it to backup (and restore, sometimes) my desktop (self build) and Dell laptop, my brother's Dell desktop and my dad's Toshiba laptop.

I was going to suggest:

- Clonezilla onto a spare disk
- GParted boot CD, shrink it down to <120GB (could do this on the original if you like, but the first step is just in case)
- Clonezilla onto the SSD
- GParted again, inflate back up to the full size of the SSD

Or, as suggested, use it as an opportunity to have a fresh install, install your old disk on another channel so you can copy over files and settings, etc. If you use Firefox you could overwrite the profile directory with the one from the old disk and get everything there back, even saved passwords, plugins and cookies (forum and email logins, etc).

Hell yeah! My boot time went from 9 mins to 1 min 30.... (just a straight clone, nothing else changed)

Nine minutes, youwha? Um, actually, after witnessing the amount of crap pre-installed on my dad's Toshiba that seems quite reasonable

 

[Eklipze3k]

I eventually went for the fresh install option, got bored of faffing around with stuff, thanks anyway for all the suggestions chaps/chapettes

 

[ben]

Nine minutes, youwha? Um, actually, after witnessing the amount of crap pre-installed on my dad's Toshiba that seems quite reasonable

Yup - it was strange, just got slower and slower over time, despite nothing new being put on it. I hated having to reboot for obvious reasons!

But yeah, a change to the SSD and it flew!

One thing I noticed about Ghost though is it's bad at putting a big partition onto a smaller partition - that never worked for me. I would always have to clear it, defrag it, then shrink it in Windows to allow the clone to work.

 

[RuSZ]

Im now in a similar situation, im upgrading parts on my laptop and just bought a Hitacthi 2.5" 500gb HDD to replace my Toshiba 160gb drive.

Im a relative noob to this, but whats the best way to transfer all the stuff from my original drive to the new one and make it bootable.

at the moment my computer isnt regocnising the drive, ive connected it up to my Seagate External drive connecter and its not showing it. how can i get it show up?

Cheers


P.s. would like to aviod doing a clean install. My laptop came with Vista on it and i downloaded the W7 update from Microsoft and have since lost the paperwork ive got for it :damn:

 

[BlueDan]

New disk probably is being picked up, but it won't show in My Computer if it isn't partitioned. Download, burn and boot the clonezilla CD and carefully read the prompts (select disk to disk, the old one as the source and the new one as the destination). Install the new disk in place of the old when it is done. If it doesn't work, and provided you did select the right source and destination the old disk will still have everything on so you can swap back if need be.

 

[BlueDan]

And then use 7's built in disk management to expand the partition to fill the new disk, at first it will be the size of the old one.

 

[RuSZ]

And then use 7's built in disk management to expand the partition to fill the new disk, at first it will be the size of the old one.

I wont be using Windows DM.. last time i used it to expand a partition it corrupted a 32gb MicroSD card.

ive used Easus Partition Manager ever since

Thanks for the help.. will see how it goes

 

[RuSZ]

Been having issues with CloneZilla. so resorted to using EaseUS ToDo Backup.

But now got an issue where it wont let me keep my data on the soure drives.

i tell it to clone a drive and it says that all data will be deleted from the source after cloning to the new destination.

is this fine if i create a bootable CD

 

[BlueDan]

Hmm no problems with it here, I use it to back up four systems and used it to transfer one to a bigger disk once too which went fine. What did it tell you, if anything?

 

[RuSZ]

Hmm no problems with it here, I use it to back up four systems and used it to transfer one to a bigger disk once too which went fine. What did it tell you, if anything?

Nothing.. me been stupid and miss reading it :bang:

I had pre partitioned the destination drive and was expecting just "Move" each original partition into the new partitions. but ToDo wasnt happy with that and wanted to delete the partitions. and i thought it meant the original ones.

However i had to cancel the transfer after 1hour.. the count down got stuck at 2:06:58 remaining and the old hard drive started clicking (what i believed as Click of Death)

was i just been over cautious??

 

[BlueDan]

Hmm, not sure. Is the old disk still working at the moment?

CZ (and other similar tools) would copy over the entire contents of the disk, partitions included, not just the files. This means they could potentially hit a bad part of the disk and get stuck as they are reading the whole thing back to front, so maybe try running a full scandisk first, in case it needs to mark a part of itself as bad so it can avoid it? (Although it should do this automatically, if possible).

 

[RuSZ]

Done and running now. Went back and used a different program to do it, Easeus Partition Master, it slowed down at around 40% and took 5hours but got the job done.

Now the issue is that I can't Resize the size of the C: drive meaning that's stuck at 70gb and my D: drive is 425gb. :bang:

 

[BlueDan]

What was it before, 70/90?

It shouldn't take too long to shrink the big one back down and shuffle it along to the end of the disk, then resize the C drive to fill the space in between.

Or even just delete that partition, resize the C drive to fill the whole disk, then copy the files across from the 2nd partition on the old disk. I'm guessing you only had a separate data partition because that's how your laptop came.

 

[RuSZ]

Yeah, 70/90 that's how it was delivered from Toshiba.

I did a full shut down and on restart Partition Master did a few system checks. After that it let me edit the size of the C: drive. It had locked the system drive because of the above checks. The initial available space was between C and D so didn't need shuffling.

Now got a 100gb System drive and 2 ~200gb partitions

Boot up is much quicker and whole system is smoother now from basic use.. But that might have been the memory update too... (from 2gb DDR2 to 4gb DDR2)