Ok here is my problem and I will start at the beginning. A few years ago I had a 500gb hard drive in a HP laptop with Vista (NTFS file system) that developed several pending sectors according to SMART. All data was intact and the machine booted fine. The number did not increase, nor decrease, and I kept regular backups to another, external drive. However, I decided I had better clone the drive and keep a backup like that for when it failed. After looking at my options I decided on Clonezilla and created a USB thumb drive using TUXboot for it. I have no idea what version it was, but downloaded 11/2011.
I booted from the USB thumbdrive and clonezilla in a normal direct clone from the main disk to another, the internal and external (via eSATA) were the exact same make and model drive. Clonezilla stopped due to the pending sectors. So then I ran it in recovery mode. It completed in about 5 hours or so. The backup seemed good. I have been updating the data part of the drive, but recently I tried this cloned drive and it wouldn't boot. So I decided to clone again. Thinking that Clonezilla must be better since I used it last, I downloaded a fresh copy (clonezilla-live-2.3.1-18-amd64.iso) and this time burned it to CD and ran it from said CD.
I ran it in recovery mode (that is the only option I changed in advanced, kept the rest of the defaults) and shortly after it started it encountered the same sectors as before and kept going fine. Then I noticed the time to completion was now at 19 hours. I thought that was a glitch. And indeed at one point (about 2 or 3 hours into the clone) it revered to 9 hours remaining. Still a lot more than the previous time but I thought still manageable. Unfortunately when the time clicked down to 0 it reset to 15 hours. And in the end it took 19 hours total before the clone completed. Why in the world did it take so long this time? The number of secors is the same, it didn't encounter any more errors than last time YET it took 19 hours? Average speed was 60mb/s.
So why did it take so long this time? Has clonezilla become slower? I haven't tried to boot the cloned drive yet, but the original drive is working just the same as before and no worse for the wear. Any insights are appreciated.
Also I have a feeling the clone won't work. I noticed that when fixboot ran at the end of the clone I saw (element not found). Which doesn't make sense as I know it should be there if the clone was a full 1:1 copy of the drive.
And finally is there a pause or cancel command for a clone in process? Any ideas how I can speed this up? As I said the drives are exactly identcal models and are SATA. One is in a external enclosure and hooked up via eSATA. But that is the same as when I cloned it the first time. Oh and is there a way to "refreash" the screen in the middle of a clone operation? The GUI got all skiodd due to the several sector errors (the first few were fine but after about the 5th or so everything went wonky, all the information is there just harder to read). It did this the first time I did the clone back in 2011 so I am surprised it still did the same now.
Ok I managed to dig up the previous version I used: clonezilla-live-1.2.4-28-686 I bet the speed difference was due to x64 vs x86. That and possibly CD vs flash drive. But it souldn't make a difference one Clonezilla is running right?
Any info is apprecated.
Last edit: DBDigital 2015-01-29
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If the hardware is all the same, maybe it's due to the Linux kernel regression which fails to support your hardware well.
You could try different version of Clonezilla live, because they come with different versions of Linux kernel, e.g.
Clonezilla live 20150202-vivid comes with Linux kernel 3.18: http://clonezilla.org/downloads.php
Steven.
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
Yes the hardware was all the same. I did finally manage to make a clone of vista boot drive in a little over 2 hours of a very full 500GB drive and it booted without needing a repair/recover disk (the first time I did it, the disk was necessary to fix the boot loader). This new attempt was without -recovery mode. Same hardware as previously (same model HD and computer)
Direct disk to disk clone via esata with clonezilla-live-2.3.1-18-i686-pae installed to USB thumb drive and in advanced:
turn off -g grubboot loader reinstall
-e1 left on (automatically adjust file system for boot partition)
-j2 on (clone hidden data between partitions)
turn OFF -r resize the filesystem to fit partition
then I used partition table from source disk
This should work for Windows 7 and 8 (from what I have read and the OS's are similar in boot loading), providing you have auto hibernation upon shutdown off (or quick boot I think it is called in Windows 8, I forget the term Microsoft used just make sure that is off and you do a full normal shutdown without hibernation).
I used clonezilla-live-2.3.1-18-i686-pae installed to a USB flash drive. Not sure if that had anything to do with it or that I didn't have to use recovery mode. But regardless the turning off of -g and -r made the disk bootable without the need of a recovery disk.
Last edit: DBDigital 2015-02-17
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
Ok here is my problem and I will start at the beginning. A few years ago I had a 500gb hard drive in a HP laptop with Vista (NTFS file system) that developed several pending sectors according to SMART. All data was intact and the machine booted fine. The number did not increase, nor decrease, and I kept regular backups to another, external drive. However, I decided I had better clone the drive and keep a backup like that for when it failed. After looking at my options I decided on Clonezilla and created a USB thumb drive using TUXboot for it. I have no idea what version it was, but downloaded 11/2011.
I booted from the USB thumbdrive and clonezilla in a normal direct clone from the main disk to another, the internal and external (via eSATA) were the exact same make and model drive. Clonezilla stopped due to the pending sectors. So then I ran it in recovery mode. It completed in about 5 hours or so. The backup seemed good. I have been updating the data part of the drive, but recently I tried this cloned drive and it wouldn't boot. So I decided to clone again. Thinking that Clonezilla must be better since I used it last, I downloaded a fresh copy (clonezilla-live-2.3.1-18-amd64.iso) and this time burned it to CD and ran it from said CD.
I ran it in recovery mode (that is the only option I changed in advanced, kept the rest of the defaults) and shortly after it started it encountered the same sectors as before and kept going fine. Then I noticed the time to completion was now at 19 hours. I thought that was a glitch. And indeed at one point (about 2 or 3 hours into the clone) it revered to 9 hours remaining. Still a lot more than the previous time but I thought still manageable. Unfortunately when the time clicked down to 0 it reset to 15 hours. And in the end it took 19 hours total before the clone completed. Why in the world did it take so long this time? The number of secors is the same, it didn't encounter any more errors than last time YET it took 19 hours? Average speed was 60mb/s.
So why did it take so long this time? Has clonezilla become slower? I haven't tried to boot the cloned drive yet, but the original drive is working just the same as before and no worse for the wear. Any insights are appreciated.
Also I have a feeling the clone won't work. I noticed that when fixboot ran at the end of the clone I saw (element not found). Which doesn't make sense as I know it should be there if the clone was a full 1:1 copy of the drive.
And finally is there a pause or cancel command for a clone in process? Any ideas how I can speed this up? As I said the drives are exactly identcal models and are SATA. One is in a external enclosure and hooked up via eSATA. But that is the same as when I cloned it the first time. Oh and is there a way to "refreash" the screen in the middle of a clone operation? The GUI got all skiodd due to the several sector errors (the first few were fine but after about the 5th or so everything went wonky, all the information is there just harder to read). It did this the first time I did the clone back in 2011 so I am surprised it still did the same now.
Ok I managed to dig up the previous version I used: clonezilla-live-1.2.4-28-686 I bet the speed difference was due to x64 vs x86. That and possibly CD vs flash drive. But it souldn't make a difference one Clonezilla is running right?
Any info is apprecated.
Last edit: DBDigital 2015-01-29
If the hardware is all the same, maybe it's due to the Linux kernel regression which fails to support your hardware well.
You could try different version of Clonezilla live, because they come with different versions of Linux kernel, e.g.
Clonezilla live 20150202-vivid comes with Linux kernel 3.18:
http://clonezilla.org/downloads.php
Steven.
Yes the hardware was all the same. I did finally manage to make a clone of vista boot drive in a little over 2 hours of a very full 500GB drive and it booted without needing a repair/recover disk (the first time I did it, the disk was necessary to fix the boot loader). This new attempt was without -recovery mode. Same hardware as previously (same model HD and computer)
Direct disk to disk clone via esata with clonezilla-live-2.3.1-18-i686-pae installed to USB thumb drive and in advanced:
turn off -g grubboot loader reinstall
-e1 left on (automatically adjust file system for boot partition)
-j2 on (clone hidden data between partitions)
turn OFF -r resize the filesystem to fit partition
then I used partition table from source disk
This should work for Windows 7 and 8 (from what I have read and the OS's are similar in boot loading), providing you have auto hibernation upon shutdown off (or quick boot I think it is called in Windows 8, I forget the term Microsoft used just make sure that is off and you do a full normal shutdown without hibernation).
I used clonezilla-live-2.3.1-18-i686-pae installed to a USB flash drive. Not sure if that had anything to do with it or that I didn't have to use recovery mode. But regardless the turning off of -g and -r made the disk bootable without the need of a recovery disk.
Last edit: DBDigital 2015-02-17
Good. Thanks for your sharing.
Steven.