Just f.y.i

It’s been a while so I went back through the process and did not get prompted for a password or get an authentication error when I su’ed to root. What version of clonezilla are you using? I’d like to see if I could replicate and I might be able to advise you better.

You may be able to achieve the same thing by running “sudo bash”. As long as “whoami” shows root then you should ok. Can you post some more details about your configuration so I can do more research?

As always, thank you for taking the time to comment on my article!

FIRESTORM_v1

I am so very happy that you were able to complete your upgrade! Thank you for letting me know that your external drive method was a success.

After reading about your drive copy time, I can understand why your copy didn’ take very long at all. A standard USB2 hard drive has about a 480Mbps transfer rate which is almost 5 times a standard network connection. With your estimate, had you been doing it over the network, it would have taken you about 2 1/2 to 3 hours to transfer it all.

I think that your use of the external drive is definately a life saver (ans a timesaver too).

I do thank you for writing back and hope you have fun with your upgraded hard drive.

FIRESTORM_v1

just want to tell you that I succseded. I took an external HDD (USB2), created a primary partition to be sure _where_ the image will be created and no data would damaged. I used “savedisk” to let CloneZilla write an image there. Than I swapped HDD’s, used the option “restoredisk” to write the data on the new disk and things were just fine.

And after all that has been written about the long time it would take to create a image, I was quite surprised about the speed: it only took about 30 minutes to create the image of my 60 GB HDD and another 30 minutes to write the image to the new HDD (500 GB).

To change the size of the partiton on the new HDD I just installed the program Partition Magic to get more allocatable space. Done.

Kind regards,

Martin

Thank you for your kind words. My girlfriend was very excited when she went from a 40GB to a 250GB hard drive overnight.

You don’t have to use a “server” in the sense of the word, any windows based computer with a hard drive bigger than your original HD will work fine. I just used the words “image server” to distinguish between the windows XP machine I was putting the image (zeus) and the test installation I was upgrading.

As far as using an external drive, I’m really not sure. I would hate to give you bad advice but I haven’t tried this method. As long as your external drive is capable of being written to by the linux OS that makes up the Clonezilla CD you shouldn’t have a problem.

I would try the first half of the how-to first, make your image copy to your external hard drive. That way, if you can’t get the image to the external drive, you will know full on that you won’t be able to proceed without having made any changes to your original hard drive. This is another reason why I suggested using another windows machine as you won’t have to worry about compatibility or filesystems or anything like that.

If that doesn’t work, but you do have another windows machine, try using the external drive on the other machine and use it to temporarily act as the image server. This will save you from having to go through a lot of extra effort to get the copy done.

I wish you the best of luck in your migration.

FIRESTORM_v1

Great howto! I ran into the same problem, because I need to upgrade my IBM T60 from 60 GB HDD to 500 GB HDD. But I don’t have a server here, just an external HDD which should work as well. But I am still not sure what will happen to my external drive – will CloneZilla just save the image on that drive as NTFS-formated image, so that the other files that are on my external drive won’t get lost?

I would be glad I you could help me out with an answer.

Kind regards (to you and your girlfriend as well

Martin