Live-HD Clonezilla installation

[Jay]

Let me explain my situation first:

I am currently running Windows 8.1 on a uEFI system. I've been wanting to dual-boot with clonezilla-live-2.2.0-31-amd64.zip so that whenever my system crashes, I can hold the Shift key (reveals the Grub menu) and restore from then on. I tried installing it by placing it in a separate partition and modifying Clonezilla's Grub2 but my system boots straight to Windows. I tried editing the boot flag of the partition (using GParted) but it still does not work.

I have one hard drive and I am planning to have 3 partitions: (1) Windows; (2) "my personal files" partition formatted NTFS; (3) Clonezilla partition. I am intending to use (2) for storing the backup files. (1) is the partition to be backed up.

To be honest, I have no idea how to boot anything aside from livecds, windows, and ubuntu. I have extremely limited knowledge on boot sectors, mbr, etc. so I depend on standard procedures to manipulate boot for me. In this case, I am assuming that Clonezilla does not modify any boot "stuff". I researched the internet about this and I was not smart enough to figure it out I guess.

I am very inexperienced when it comes to using Linux Terminal and I do not use any Linux Distribution. As much as possible, please describe the general procedure instead of posting "terminal commands".

Notes:

• Unfortunately, the filesystem table used is MS-DOS instead of GPT. I am planning to reformat it very, very soon to GPT

My Questions are:

• How should I install clonezilla-live-20140630-trusty-amd64.zip to my local partition?
• If I ever get to make it work, can you please post an example of a pre-seeded Grub menu entry that will automatically restore a partition without prompting the user for the location of the backup? (still prompts for confirmation)
• About this code:

from EFI\boot\grub.cfg

menuentry "Clonezilla live (Default settings, VGA 800x600)"{
  search --set -f /live/vmlinuz
  linux /live/vmlinuz boot=live username=user config quiet noswap edd=on nomodeset noeject locales= keyboard-layouts= ocs_live_run="ocs-live-general" ocs_live_extra_param="" ocs_live_batch=no vga=788 ip=frommedia  nosplash i915.blacklist=yes radeonhd.blacklist=yes nouveau.blacklist=yes vmwgfx.enable_fbdev=no
  initrd /live/initrd.img
}

from http://clonezilla.org/livehd.php

menuentry "Clonezilla" {
set root=(hd0,4)
  linux /live-hd/vmlinuz boot=live live-config noswap nolocales edd=on nomodeset ocs_live_run=\"ocs-live-general\" ocs_live_extra_param=\"\" keyboard-layouts=\"\" ocs_live_batch=\"no\" locales=\"\" vga=788 ip=frommedia nosplash live-media-path=/live-hd bootfrom=/dev/sda4 toram=filesystem.squashfs
  initrd /live-hd/initrd.img
}

The website said "Remember to put back slash \ before " for the boot parameters in grub 2. Otherwise it won't shown in /proc/cmdline, then some actions of Clonezilla won't work." Is this still applicable for the latest version?

Thank you for bearing with me. Please reply and thank you for your support.

[Steven Shiau]

Since you are not an experienced user, then we suggest you use Clonezilla live on the USB stick to take an image for the whole system first. With this, you have a chance to roll back when something goes wrong.
"How should I install clonezilla-live-20140630-trusty-amd64.zip to my local partition?" -> As you have read, just try the description on
http://clonezilla.org/livehd.php

"Remember to put back slash \ before " for the boot parameters in grub 2. Otherwise it won't shown in /proc/cmdline, then some actions of Clonezilla won't work." Is this still applicable for the latest version? -> It's always safe to use back slash for that. However, newer grub 2 does not have to use that. Once you test it then you will know that.

Steven.