I would like to clone an existing drive on a computer running Vista to an external drive that is NTFS. How exactly do I do it. I made a bootable 4GB USB drive with Clonezilla Live on it. Do I use that to boot up Clonezilla on the laptop, then clone to the external drive. I am trying to make a bootable image of the current hard drive onto an external drive, so that we can use that external drive to reformat other computers with a base image. What exactly do I do???
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
Thanks for giving Clonezilla (CZ) a try, it should have no problem doing what you've described! You are correct, you will need to let the USB boot the laptop. From reading these forums, if the USB causes you any trouble, it may be easier to download and burn a CD of the iso and boot that instead especially the first time out.
Please note, backing up important information *BEFORE* messing with drives or working out a new cloning process is *ALWAYS* a good idea.
If I understand things correctly, all you have to do is have CZ boot the computer to be imaged then follow the prompts to image the machine to the external drive (details below). It may be helpful to become familiar with Linux device <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Device_file_system#Naming_conventions">naming conventions</a>. That way you can be sure you are choosing the correct source and target partitions (on the right drives).
I think you will need to follow the 'device-image' route and use 'beginner mode' to make a 'partition image' to a 'local' device. Once you have saved the partition image of the internal drive (source) to the external drive (target), you would be able to boot CZ and restore that partition image (source) to a partition (target).
In my experience, Vista is sensitive to changes in hardware so, running sysprep prior to making the image may be advisable. I'm not really sure how that works, others around here likely have more details. If you are doing major cloning like 5 or 10 or more restores, I recommend researching the CZ server options. A server can handle multiple parallel restores at once, but is more complicated to set up and run, aka I haven't done it, but it seems very popular with many users! If you do go the server route, you may also want to customize CZ's behavior or automate it which I believe is also possible, though, again, others would have to provide details.
Let us know if you have more questions or how things go, thanks!
Alan
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
I would like to clone an existing drive on a computer running Vista to an external drive that is NTFS. How exactly do I do it. I made a bootable 4GB USB drive with Clonezilla Live on it. Do I use that to boot up Clonezilla on the laptop, then clone to the external drive. I am trying to make a bootable image of the current hard drive onto an external drive, so that we can use that external drive to reformat other computers with a base image. What exactly do I do???
fess90,
Thanks for giving Clonezilla (CZ) a try, it should have no problem doing what you've described! You are correct, you will need to let the USB boot the laptop. From reading these forums, if the USB causes you any trouble, it may be easier to download and burn a CD of the iso and boot that instead especially the first time out.
Please note, backing up important information *BEFORE* messing with drives or working out a new cloning process is *ALWAYS* a good idea.
If I understand things correctly, all you have to do is have CZ boot the computer to be imaged then follow the prompts to image the machine to the external drive (details below). It may be helpful to become familiar with Linux device <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Device_file_system#Naming_conventions">naming conventions</a>. That way you can be sure you are choosing the correct source and target partitions (on the right drives).
I think you will need to follow the 'device-image' route and use 'beginner mode' to make a 'partition image' to a 'local' device. Once you have saved the partition image of the internal drive (source) to the external drive (target), you would be able to boot CZ and restore that partition image (source) to a partition (target).
In my experience, Vista is sensitive to changes in hardware so, running sysprep prior to making the image may be advisable. I'm not really sure how that works, others around here likely have more details. If you are doing major cloning like 5 or 10 or more restores, I recommend researching the CZ server options. A server can handle multiple parallel restores at once, but is more complicated to set up and run, aka I haven't done it, but it seems very popular with many users! If you do go the server route, you may also want to customize CZ's behavior or automate it which I believe is also possible, though, again, others would have to provide details.
Let us know if you have more questions or how things go, thanks!
Alan
You can refer to this
http://clonezilla.org/clonezilla-live/doc/
too.
Alan, thanks for the nice reply.
Steven.
Steven,
Thanks for the link! :)
Alan