Newbie here. Few questions on disk imaging with Clonezilla.

[Prakash]

Hi,

My Windows10 Dell laptop has a 1TB internal HD of which only around 90GB (including space for EFI, OEM & recovery partitions) are used; can I image only those 90GB to an external drive?
My external drive (USB HD) doesn't have space for 1TB image file, but it can definitely store 90GB. Hence the question.
Will appreciate if you guys can suggest a way to do this because I can't free up the space on external drive and I don't want to buy another external drive.
Partition/volume details of my internal HD are pasted at the end of this post.

Bit of context:
I raised a support request with Dell for a new HD because my current HD is acting up and Dell hardware diagnostics program also reported an error with my internal HD. Dell is sending a new, identical HD with a tech-support engineer to install it. But I was also told by Dell that the tech-support engineer won't clone my old HD nor will he wait for cloning to finish; he will take the old HD with him immediately after installing the new HD into my laptop.
That is the reason I want to image my current internal HD to an external drive and restore it to new internal HD.

Few more questions:
- The image will be stored as a file on external drive, and clonezilla won't erase existing contents/files on external drive, right?
- I assume imaging will work for Windows 10 too, right?.
- Will licences of Windows and other s/w work just fine after restoring the image to the new HD.
- How much time, approximately, will it take to image 100GB from 5400 rpm HD on a 4th gen i7 CPU based laptop over a USB 3.0 connection, and how much time to restore to a 5400 rpm HD on the same laptop over a USB 3.0?
Time estimates for any size will help because this is the 1st time I will be doing an image & restore, and I am trying to see if I have to get a spare laptop to do my regular work while I wait for image & restore to finish on my Dell laptop, or should I have to do image & restore overnight before going to bed.

Will appreciate a reply ASAP.

Thanks.

DISKPART>

DISKPART> list disk

Disk ### Status Size Free Dyn Gpt

---

• Disk 0 Online 931 GB 0 B *

DISKPART> list volume

Volume ### Ltr Label Fs Type Size Status Info

---

Volume 0 C OS NTFS Partition 922 GB Healthy Boot
Volume 1 ESP FAT32 Partition 500 MB Healthy System
Volume 2 WINRETOOLS NTFS Partition 750 MB Healthy Hidden
Volume 3 NTFS Partition 450 MB Healthy Hidden
Volume 4 PBR Image NTFS Partition 7422 MB Healthy Hidden

DISKPART>

[Steven Shiau]

"can I image only those 90GB to an external drive? " -> Yes. By saving an image of it, basically Clonezilla will only saved the used blocks on the hard drive.
"The image will be stored as a file on external drive, and clonezilla won't erase existing contents/files on external drive, right?" -> Yes.
"- I assume imaging will work for Windows 10 too, right?." -> Yes.
"- Will licences of Windows and other s/w work just fine after restoring the image to the new HD." -> Basically yes. Clonezilla just clones the used blocks for you. The software is there.
"- How much time, approximately, will it take to image 100GB from 5400 rpm HD on a 4th gen i7 CPU based laptop over a USB 3.0 connection, and how much time to restore to a 5400 rpm HD on the same laptop over a USB 3.0? " -> If your USB 3.0 hardware is supported by Clonezilla live, basically I think you can save image with the rate like 3 GB/min, and it can be faster I believe. However, this really depends on many factores.
It's recommended to refere to this doc for how to use Clonezilla live:
http://clonezilla.org/clonezilla-live-doc.php

//NOTE// Backup important data before you use Clonezilla. Just in case.

Steven

[Prakash]

Thanks Steven for the response. I hope you won't mind answering few more questions:

• My Windows10 Dell laptop has secure boot enabled (UEFI bios). I have to use ubuntu-based image (clonezilla-live-20160627-xenial-amd64.zip) for clonezilla boot media, right?

• Is it a good idea to enable/check -rm-win-swap-hib option in expert mode while saving my Windows 10 disk image? It will reduce the size of my saved image.

• Except EFI system partition (ESP), all other partitions of my disk are NTFS. So does enabling/checking the -fsck-src-part option has any effect/use while saving my Windows 10 disk image?

• Any other expert mode options do you suggest enabling/checking while saving the image? I plan to use beginner mode while restoring the image to disk, though.