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Cloning 2 smaller drives onto 1 bigger drive?

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Frank
2010-02-01
2013-04-05
  • Frank

    Frank - 2010-02-01

    Hi all,

    I need expert help with the following situation. I want to clone my drives/partitions from machine A to machine B, to avoid going through all the time-consuming process of installing, updating and configuring all os and apps. Merging user data is not as difficult, but nearly as much of a time killer. First, let me design the status quo and the plan. Basically, I want to merge 2 physical drives from machine A onto 1 drive in machine B. So here's the layout with assigned drive letters:

    Machine A:

    drive 1 (hda): 40 gb pata (37.25 gb total space), set as master on ide0
    partitions:
      hda1: primary, ntfs, 27.25 gb, windows xp, bootable (c:)
      hda5: logical in extended, fat32, 10 gb, hidden

    drive 2 (hdb): 80 gb pata (74.53 gb), set as slave on ide0
    partitions:
      hdb1: primary, ntfs, 1.47 gb, used exclusively for windows pagefile (e:)
      hdb5: logical in extended, ntfs, 7.62 gb, data (f:)
      hdb6: logical in extended, ntfs, 8.79 gb, data (g:)
      hdb7: logical in extended, ntfs, 18.56 gb, data (h:)
      hdb8: logical in extended, ntfs, 18.56 gb, data (i:)
      hdb9: logical in extended, ntfs, 19.52 gb, data (j:)

    drive 3 (hdd): 160 gb pata (149.05 gb), set as slave on ide1 (master is cd/dvd)
    partitions:
      hdd1: primary, ntfs, 49.69 gb, data (k:)
      hdd5: logical in extended, ntfs, 49.69 gb, data (l:)
      hdd6: logical in extended, ntfs, 49.68 gb, data (m:)

    Here's what I want machine B to look like:

    Machine B:

    drive 1 (sda): 160 gb sata
    partitions
      sda1: primary, ntfs, 40 gb, cloned from A/hda1 (c:)
      sda5: logical in extended, ntfs, 30 gb, data (e:)
      sda6: logical in extended, ntfs, 8 gb, data, cloned from A/hdb5 (f:)
      sda7: logical in extended, ntfs, 10 gb, data, cloned from A/hdb6 (g:)
      sda8: logical in extended, ntfs, 20 gb, data, cloned from A/hdb7 (h:)
      sda9: logical in extended, ntfs, 25 gb, data, cloned from A/hdb8 (i:)
      sda10: logical in extended, ntfs, 20 gb, data, cloned from A/hdb9 (j:)

    drive 2 (hdd): 160 gb pata, set as master on ide0 (slave is cd/dvd)
    this one is the drive 3 from machine A, so I'm going to unmount it from there and mount it in machine B. No cloning with Clonezilla necessary, just use GParted to resive/move partitions.
    partitions:
      hdd1: logical in extended, ntfs, 5 gb, used exclusively for windows pagefile (k:)
      hdd5: primary, ntfs, 50 gb, data, from A/hdd1 (l:)
      hdd6: logical in extended, ntfs, 50 gb, data, from A/hdd5 (m:)
      hdd7: logical in extended, ntfs, 50 gb, data, from A/hdd6 (n:)

    Now the 64k question: how do I achieve this with Clonezilla/GParted?

    My first attempt was unsuccessful. As a preparation I used GParted to make the partitions in B/sda. I managed to clone A/hda1 to B/sda1 by ticking the appropriate box in Clonezille in the first run. But in the second run, the following partitions got somehow mixed up, probably because of the different numbering of the partitions. The images from machine A go like hdb1, hdb5, hdb6, hdb7, hdb8, hdb9. But GParted left numbers in machine B like sda1, sda5, sda6, sda7, sda8, sda9, sda10. So image A/hdb1 was not cloned to B/sda5 like I inteded. Obviously Clonezilla copies the images only to partitions with corresponding numbers. Therefore, it reported a size error when "wrongfully" trying to copy A/hdb7 to B/sda7. But the intended cloning should be (as described above):
    A/hda1 -> B/sda1
    A/hdb1 -> B/sda5
    A/hdb5 -> B/sda6
    A/hdb6 -> B/sda7
    A/hdb7 -> B/sda8
    A/hdb8 -> B/sda9
    A/hdb9 -> B/sda10

    Additionally, I got a windows blue screen with error 0x7B when starting machine B. Using fixmbr from recovery console didn't help. After a second try of fixmbr and fixboot everything got messed up, partition tables somehow lost and all data "gone". I gave up at that point to turn to you experienced guys, for my problem seems a bit out of the ordinary (from what I could find in the forums so far).

    Can anybody help with advice, please?
    Thnx in advance!
    Frank

     

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