Clonezilla Full Backup – How To Clone TriBoot (MultiBoot) HDDs

[ek9hatch0wn3r]

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A friend recently setup a TriBoot and I couldn’t find a simple tutorial for this on the forum, so I thought I’d post it for him as well as others on how to clone a drive using CloneZilla. This particular method performs a sector-by-sector clone of one disk to another disk. For this reason, it’s easiest to simply buy two identical drive capacities (e.g., (2) x 1.5 Tb HDDs).

I prefer CloneZilla for two reasons- it’s free and it’s extremely versatile.

Purpose:
to make an IDENTICAL cloned disk, regardless of boot and partition types (ext, fat, hfs, ntfs, ufs) so that no repair, restore, or load processes are needed

Preparation:
To begin, a LIVE CD will need to be downloaded and burned as an ISO from CloneZilla’s site: http://clonezilla.org/downloads/stable/iso-zip-files.php
I am using the 20110530-natty.iso file, but this process should work for versions that are more recent as well.

CloneZilla will identify the drives based on their S/Ns so be sure to write down and distinguish between the drive you want to backup/clone (referred to by CloneZilla as “source”) and the drive that will be erased over and serve as the backup drive (referred to by CloneZilla as “target”). The last 4 serial numbers—found on the sticker of each drive—is usually sufficient because the probability of an identical match at that point is 10^4. It is best to unplug all drives except the two needed for this procedure to make the menus shorter and to identify the drives easier. If possible, to be certain other drives aren’t accidentally written over, verify the “source” disk S/N by booting back into the drive with it being the only HDD plugged in before proceeding.

Procedure:
1. Power on the desktop and press F12 (for Gigabyte mobos) repeatedly to boot from the CD-ROM by arrowing down, selecting CD-ROM and pressing Enter.
• The LIVE CloneZilla disk will now load.
2. Select the default VGA 800x600, press Enter
3. Select language: en_US UFT-8 English, press Enter
4. Select: don’t touch keymap, press Enter
5. Select: Start CloneZilla, press Enter
6. Arrow down to “device-device…”, press Enter
7. Select: Expert Mode, press Enter
8. Select: disk_to_local_disk, press Enter
9. Choose local drive as source, press Enter
• This is the drive where everything currently running is located and needs to be cloned.
10. Choose local drive as target, press Enter
• This drive should be empty and partitioned, because everything will be lost and overwritten. It will serve as the backup/cloned drive.
11. Use the spacebar to select with an asterisk the follow: -e1, -e2, -j2, -r, -q1, -v, press Enter
12. Select: Use the partition table from the source disk, press Enter
13. Type y, press Enter
14. Type y, press Enter
15. Partclone will run and clone the entire drive. The % remaining is for a given partition, meaning that if you have 3 partitions for different OSes and a boot partition, you’ll have much more time than estimated by the % shown. My rate of SATA 1.5TB Western Digital Black Caviars hover around 1GB/min.

Final Comments:
I normally set the cloning disk-to-disk up overnight, so the lengthy time it takes to clone a HDD containing multiple OSes is not an issue.

To confirm the backup/clone HDD is of any use, unplug the “source” drive, reboot the computer, and make sure all three operating systems properly boot.

 

[kostastnt]

Clonezilla – HowTo Backup Cloning TriBoot (MultiBoot) HDDs

Perfect guide and program!! Thank you very much!!

I have one problem.. I have 6 partitions:

sda:200mb efi
sdb:150gb Mountain Lion HFS+
sdc:100gb Windows 7 NTFS
sdd:70gb Storage partition between OSes FAT32
sde:8gb Linux swap
sdf:60gb Ubuntu ext4

The problem is that sdf cant be copied.. Dont know why but i can post later the message error..

Is there anything special i have to do, to clone a linux partition?

Thank you!

 

[brickpower]

Nice guide! I just did a clonezilla backup of my system and one thing I would add to the guide, is before you begin, to go into SATA in System Report and write down the serial numbers of the source and destination disks you will be using. Double check them, then check them again. Use the serial numbers to make sure you have the correct source and destination disks in clonezilla. After that, its super fast and easy and as risk free as it gets.

 

[bassgeo]

Thank you! Your Tutorial is great!
I just cloned my M.Lion to a new hard disk successfully!!!

 

[tornol]

Sorry for resurrecting the dead.

I got this message:

This disk contains mismatched GPT and MBR partition: /dev/sda

The Clonezilla FAQ says:

You might have installed an OS with GPT partition table, and later overwrite the disk by installing another OS with MBR partition table. The MBR partition table editor, e.g. fdisk, sfdisk, or cdisk does not know GPT, so it overwrite part of the GPT partition table, but did not clean the rest completely. Therefore that's why you got such a message.
If you are sure your running OS is using MBR partition table, not GPT one, you can run
sudo sgdisk -z /dev/sdx
(Replace /dev/sdx with your disk name, e.g. /dev/sda for the 1st hard drive) to clean the GPT partition table, while keep the MBR partition table. //NOTE// Use the above command carefully. It might destroy everything on the harddrive.

I installed MAC and after that Windows, and used multibeast later to recover Chameleon Boot loader, what should I do? I'm very frightened to destroy my hdd in the process.

Here's my partition table:

[FONT=Menlo]  #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER[/FONT][FONT=Menlo]   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *1.0 TB     disk0[/FONT]
[FONT=Menlo]   1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk0s1[/FONT]
[FONT=Menlo]   2:                  Apple_HFS macintosh               69.3 GB    disk0s2[/FONT]
[FONT=Menlo]   3:                  Apple_HFS mavericks               180.0 GB   disk0s3[/FONT]
[FONT=Menlo]   4:       Microsoft Basic Data Melomano                749.9 GB   disk0s4[/FONT]

Mavericks is the current MAC partition and Macintosh is a Time Machine partition.

Please help!

 

[cappy10]

My issue is that my target drive shows the same available space as the source drive, and the target drive is 4x larger!!!

Can someone help me? I used clonezilla of course used the -k1 option and the -k option both end with the same result. unallocated space in the OS x partition.

Any suggestions??

 

[sgade]

I have now cloned my small 150BG working SSD til my large 1TB SSD, i works but CloneZilla down sizes my drive. How can i prevent that form happening??