I needed to back up an HP Pavilion laptop running Windows XP, so I attached a Thermaltake Black Widow BlacX Duet Dual Hard Drives Docking Station to the laptop and inserted a new unpartitioned 2.5" hard disk drive in the docking station to use as a backup drive for the internal drive in the laptop. I intended to use Clonezilla to backup the internal drive to the external USB-attached drive, but I didn't want to clone one drive to the other, since I wanted to be able to store multiple backups on the external drive, so I needed to partition and format the external drive.
If you need to create and format a partition on an external drive, e.g., a USB-attached drive that you will be using to backup a system with Clonezilla using image files on the destination drive, rather than cloning the source drive to the destination drive (for cloning one drive to another, see Cloning a Drive with Clonezilla), the following steps can be taken after booting from a Clonzezilla Live CD/DVD.
| Start_Clonezilla | Start Clonezilla |
| Enter_shell | Enter command line prompt |
| poweroff | Poweroff |
| reboot | Reboot |
| cmd | Enter command line prompt |
| rerun1 | Start over (image repository /home/partimag, if mounted, will be unmounted) |
sudo fdisk /dev/sda, presuming the disk drive to be partitioned
is sda. If there is only one drive in the system, it
will normally be sda or, possibly, hda, if it
is an older PATA drive.
user@debian:~$
If you wish to first check the partitioning on the internal drive that you will backup using Clonzilla you can examine it with fdisk first with a command such as the one below:
user@debian:~$sudo fdisk -l /dev/sda Disk /dev/sda: 80.1 GiB, 86052847104 bytes, 168071967 sectors Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disklable type: dos Disk identifier: 0x69205244 Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type /dev/sda1p1 218129509 1920119918 1701990410 811.6G 72 unknown /dev/sda1p2 729050177 1273024900 543974724 259.4G 74 unknown /dev/sda1p3 168653938 168653938 0 0B 65 Novell Netware 386 /dev/sda1p4 2692939776 2692991410 51635 25.2M 0 Empty Partition table entries are not in disk order. user@debian:~$
The drive and partition details shown will depend on the drive and
how it has been configured. In the example above there are 4 partitions
on the drive p1 through p4. The -l option to the fdisk command
lists the partitions. If you want to see the partitions on all
drives you can use fdisk -l without any other arguments on
the command line.
You can verify that there are no existing partitions on the new drive
with sudo fdisk /dev/sdb.
Disk /dev/sdb: 465.8 GiB, 500107862016 bytes, 976773168 sectors Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes user@debian:~$
Since no partitions are listed, I know that sdb is the
external unpartitioned drive I need to configure. Drives are usually
designated sda, sdb, sdc, etc.
If you now wish to create partitions on the new drive, you can
type sudo fdisk /dev/sdb, presuming the new drive is
sdb You will then see a "Command (m for help):" prompt.
Welcome to fdisk (util-linux 2.26.2).
Changes will remain in memory only, until you decide to write them. Be
careful before using the write command.
Command (m for help):You can type m to see a list of available commands. To see the partition arrangement on the drive type p and hit Enter. You can type o to create a new empty DOS partition table.
Command (m for help): 0 Created a new DOS disklabel with disk identifier 0xb2cd55b0
The partition table types available are as follows:
| g | create a new empty GPT partition table |
| G | create a new empty SGI (IRIX) partition table |
| o | create a new empty DOS partition table |
| s | create a new empty Sun partition table |
To add a new partition that will occupy the entire disk drive, you can type n to add a new partition to the drive.
Command (m for help): n
Partition type
p primary (0 primary, 0 extended, 4 free)
e extended (container for logical partitions)
Select (default p):
Using default response p.
Partition number (1-4, default 1):
First sector (2048-976773167, default 2048):
Last sector, + sectors or +size{K,M,G,TP} (2048-976773167, default 976773167):
Created a new partition 1 of type 'Linux' and of size 465.8 GiB.
Command (m for help):There can be up to 4 primary partitions on the drive; if you hit Enter a primary partition will be created by default. You can continue to hit Enter at the prompts to take the default values and allocate the entire disk to 1 partition as shown above. You can type p to see the details for the newly created partition. as shown below.
Command (m for help): p Disk /dev/sdb: 465.8 GiB 500107862016 bytes, 976773168 sectors Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disklabel type: dos Disk identifier: 0xb2cd55b0 Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type /dev/sdb1 2048 976773167 97677120 465.8G 83 Linux Command (m for help):
The new partition won't actually be created until you type w to write the partition table to disk and exit from fdisk. If you type q to quit without saving changes, the partitioning you have done will be lost.
To format the partition you have created, you can use the command
sudo mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdb1 to format it with the
ext3 file system.
user@debian:~$ sudo mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdb1
mke2fs 1.42.13 (17-May-2015)
Creating filesystem with 122096390 4k blocks and 30531584 inodes
Filesystem UUID: ab1b83f1-9e9d-49f0-8032-4bcb7e95590e
Superblock backups stoed on blocks:
32768, 98304, 163840, 229376, 293912, 819200, 884736, 1605632, 2654208,
4096000, 7962624, 11239424, 20480000, 23887872, 71663616, 78675968,
102400000
Allocating group tables: done
Writign inode tables: done
Creating journal (32768 blocks): done
Writing superblocks and filesystem accounting information: done
user@debian:~$If you wish to format the drive using another filesystem rather than
ext3, you can use the following syntax for the mkfs command
where fstype is the file system type you wish to use for
formatting the drive:
mkfs -t fstype /dev/DEVICE
Or you can use the syntax mkfs.fstype
Options for file system type include the following:
bfs
cramfs
exfat
ext2
ext3
ext4
fat
hfs
minix
msdos
ntfs
ufs
vfat
You can see the supported filesystems by issuing the command
ls /sbin/mkfs*.
After the format process is completed, you can start Clonezilla from
the shell prompt by typing sudo clonezilla or you can
reboot from the Live CD or DVD. You can then create a backup of the
internal drive to the external drive by storing backup files on the
external drive rather than cloning the internal drive to the external
drive. Clonezilla supports two modes:
(1) clone/restore a disk or partition using an image
(2) disk to disk or partition to partition clone/restore.
You don't need the destination disk to already be partitioned and formatted if you are cloning the source disk to the destination disk, but if you wish to "clone" the disk to an image file, instead, you will need to have a usable partition on the destination drive. E.g., in the case of an HP Pavilion laptop with Windows XP on it, I see a 465.8 GB partition on the external drive being available for backing up the internal drive after I partitioned the external drive. I.e., I can mount it as /home/partimag for the Clonezilla image(s) repository.
Now we need to mount a device as /home/partimag (Clonezilla image(s) repository
so that we can read or save the image in /home/partimag.
///NOTE/// You should NOT mount the partition you want to backup as
/home/partimag
The partition name is the device name in GNU/Linux. The first partition in the
first disk is "hda1" or "sda1", the 2nd partition in the first disk is "hda2" or
"sda2", the first partition in the second disk is "hdb1" or "sdb1"... If the
system you want to save is MS windows, normally C is hda1 (for PATA) or sda1
(for PATA, SATA or SCSI), and D: could be hda2 (or sda2), hda5 (or sda5)...
sda1 80.1G_ntfs(In_FUJITSU_MHV2100A)_FUJITSU_MHV2100AT_PL_NS91T6228C30
sda2 12G_vfat_HP_RECOVERY(In_FUJITSU_MHV2100A)_FUJITSU_MHV2100AT_PL_NS91T6228C30
sda3 1G_ntfs(In_FUJITSU_MHV2100A)_FUJITSU_MHV2100AT_PL_NS91T6228C30
sdb1 465.8G(In__-WX61A44L4423)_WDC_WD50_-WX61A44L4423_67304734999999999999-0:0
<Ok> <Cancel>
References:
Created: Friday July 3, 2015