Cloning a Drive with Clonezilla

Before installing the new disk drive, make note of the manufacturer, model number, and serial number, if the old and new drives are from the same manufacturer, on the drive itself, not the box it came in, since sometimes a model number/part number on the box a drive comes in doesn't match what is on the drive, so that you don't inadvertently select the wrong drive as the destination drive and overwrite the drive from which you wanted to make the copy.

Boot the system from the Clonezilla boot CD or DVD. To copy an existing disk in the system to a new disk you have installed, when you get to the stage where you see the following select "device-device"

*Clonezilla is free (GPL) software, and comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY*
///Hint! From now on, if multiple choices are available, you have to press space key to mark
your selection. An asterisk (*) will be shown when the selection is done///
Two modes are available, you can
(1) clone/restore a disk or partition using an image
(2) disk to disk or partition to partition clone/restore.
Select mode:
           device-image  work with disks or partitions using images
           device-device work directly from a disk or partition to a disk or partition
           

                          <OK>                              <Cancel>

In the second step after this you will need to leave "disk_to_local_disk" selected.

*Clonezilla is free (GPL) software, and comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY*
This software will overwrite the data on your hard drive when cloning! It is recommended to
backup important files on the target disk before you cloning!***

                  disk_to_local_disk  local_disk_to_local_disk clone
                  disk_to_remote disk local_disk_to_remote_disk_clone
                  part_to_local_part  local_partition_to_local_partition_clone
                  part_to_remote_part local_partition_to_remote_partition_clone
                  exit                Exit. Enter command line prompt


                          <OK>                              <Cancel>

You will then be asked to choose which device is the source disk. Make sure you select the correct one, so that you don't overwrite the one that should have been the source disk.

Choose local disk as source.
The disk name is the device name in GNU/Linux. The first disk in the system is "hda" or "sda",
the 2nd disk is "hdb" or "sdb"...

                     sda 1000.2GB_ST31000528AS__ST31000528AS_9VP0016H
		     sdb 1000GB_ST1000DM003-1CH1_ST1000DM003-1CH162_W1D45EV6


                          <OK>                              <Cancel>

In the case above, I moved the cable for what was the first hard disk drive to the new hard disk drive (HDD) and connected a cable from the secondary SATA HDD connector on the motherboard to the old drive, which was originally connected to the primary connector on the motherboard, so I selected sdb as the source drive.

You will then be prompted to select the destination/target drive. If there are only two drives in the system, the remaining drive will be selected as the destination drive and you can just hit Enter to proceed.

Choose local disk as target (ALL DATA ON THE ENTIRE DISK WILL BE LOST AND REPLACED!!)
THe disk name is the device name in GNU/Linux. The first disk in the system is "hda" or "sda",
the 2nd disk is "hdb" or "sdb"...

                         
                     sda 1000.2GB_ST31000528AS__ST31000528AS_9VP0016H


                          <OK>                              <Cancel>

At the next step, you will be prompted as to whether you wish to have Clonezilla skip checking/repairing the source file system. It can't check/repair NTFS file systems, so, if the source drive has an NTFS file system, take the default option of skipping the check.

Set the advanced parameters (mulitple choices available). If you have no idea, keep the default
value and do NOT change anything.:

                        Skip checking/repairing source file system
      -fsck-src-part    Interactively check and repair source file system before cloning
      -fsck-src-part-y  Auto (Caution!) check and repair source file system before cloning


                          <OK>                              <Cancel>

You can hit Tab to go to the OK selection and then hit Enter. You will see something like the following displayed:

PS. Next time you can run this command directly:
/usr/sbin/ocs-onthefly -g auto -e1 auto -e2 -r -j2  -f sdb -t sda
This command is also saved as this file name for later use if necessary: /tmp/ocs-onthefly-2014-12-24-21-41
*****************************************************.
Press "Enter" to continue...

When you hit enter, you will be warned again that you will be overwriting one of the drives.

WARNING!!! WARNING!!! WARNING!!!
WARNING! THE EXISTING DATA IN THIS HARDDISK/PARTITION(S) WILL BE OVERWRITTEN! ALL EXISTING DATA WILL
 BE LOST: sda
*****************************************************.
Machine: Inspiron 3847
sda (1000.2GB_ST31000528AS__ST31000528AS_9VP0016H)
*****************************************************.
Are you sure you want to continue? (y/n)

If all looks ok, type "y" and hit Enter. You will be then prompted once more to confirm you wish to proceed, just to be absolutely sure you didn't make a mistake or hit a wrong key.

You will see a lot of lines of output, such as the following during the copy process.

Units = sectors of 512 bytes, counting from 0
   Device Boot    Start       End   #sectors   Id  System
/dev/sda1            63     80324      80262   de  Dell Utility
/dev/sda2   *     81920  41570303   41488384    7  HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda3      41570304 1953521663 1911951360    7  HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda4             0         -          0    0  Empty
Warning: partition 2 does not end at a cylinder boundary
Warning: partition 3 does not end at a cylinder boundary
Successfully wrote the new partition table

Re-reading the partition table ...
If you created or changed a DOS partition, /dev/foo7, say, then use dd(1)
to zero the first 512 bytes: dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/foo7 bs=512 count=1
(see fdisk(8).)

This was done by "sfdisk --force -C 121601 -H 255 -S 63 /dev/sda </tmp/ocs_onthefly_local.z8tmGE/tg
t-pt.sf"
Informing the OS that partition table has changed...
Checking the integrity of partition table in the disk /dev/sda...
done!
*****************************************************.
The first partition of disk /dev/sda starts at 63.
Restoring the hidden data between MBR (1st sector, i.e. 512 bytes) and 1st partition, which might be
 useful for some recovery tool, by:
dd if=/tmp/ocs_onthefly_local.z8tmGE/tgt-hidden-data.img of=/dev/sda seek=1 bs=512 count=62
62+0 records in
62+ records out
31744 bytes (32 kB) copied, 0.0107045 s, 3.0 MB/s
*****************************************************.
*****************************************************.
Do you want to clone the boot loader (executable code area, the first 446 bytes) to: sda ?
[Y/n]

You should then see Partclone windows showing the progress of the partitions being copied from the source to the destination drive.

If you want to use Clonezilla again:
(1) Stay in this console (console 1), enter command line prompt
(2) Run command "exit" or "logout"
*****************************************************.
When everything is done, remember to use 'poweroff', 'reboot' or follow the menu to do a normal powe
roff/reboot procedure. Otherwise if the boot media you are using is a writeable device (such as USB f
lash drive), and it's mounted, poweroff/reboot in abnormal procedure might make it FAIL to boot next
time!
*****************************************************.
Press "Enter" to continue...

If you choose the "cmd" option, you will get a bash shell prompt for the user account. If you need to run any commands from the root account you can use sudo bash to get a bash shell prompt for the root account. From that account, you can shut down the system with the command shutdown -h now, which will eject the CD/DVD from the drive and prompt you to hit Enter to power off the system.