Restoring Windows 2003 Clone to HP Workstation fails
A partition and disk imaging/cloning program
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steven_shiau
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Hello,
We have a Windows 2003 Server that for reasons I won't go into here is not on the network. We need a backup of it so in searching we decided on Clonezilla. I don't have the exact version, but i think it was the -1 version from about a month ago. Anyway, the Clone was created fine. Said it was a recoverable image.
The other day we found an HP Workstation to attempt to test a recovery on. This system had a Linux on it, specifically a MicroLinux kernel. I don't know what file system it used. The recover appeared to complete with no errors, but when we attempted a reboot, It failed. Only displaying a flashing "-" character. So obvioulsy we had no bootable operating system.
One thing that I plan to try seeing that this HDD had Linux on it is to format in as NTFS. The theory being that Linux put some metadata on the HDD. I would assume that Clonezilla could format a drive, but perhaps a low-level format is in order here?
I would appreciate hearing from someone that may have encounterd this or knows a solution.
Thanks much in advance,
Paul
Is the destination machine same with source one?
For MS Windows, you can only clone to the same, exact model machine.
It's possible you can install "sysprep" from MS in the source machine before taking an image so that it can be restored to different model of machine. However, actually this method is not 100% working.
Steven
Thanks for the reply, Steven. I was under the impression that Clonezilla Live could deal with dissimilar hardware. The source system is an HP DL380 G7, the destination for the restore image is a high-end HP Workstation. We are not trying to actually come up and function on the workstation, just do a proof of concept. If a "real" disaster were to happen, we would be able to procure a similar DL380.
Having said all that, perhaps what we could try is getting some downtime on the source server, install an empty formatted NTFS disk, then attempting a restore of the Clone.
I don't know why we were under the impression that Clonezilla Live could restore to dissimilar hardware. I will look into running "sysprep."
Paul
OK. got it.
Yes, Clonezilla just clones or images the used blocks on the hard drive for you. It won't help you to deal with the migration. Normally this is OK for GNU/Linux, however, for MS Windows you need sysprep for that.
Steven