Clone and backup. disk-disk, win11 bitlocker
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Ive unboxed and installed 4 nvme ssds in 4 mini-pcs.
two of them with 250 or if it was 256gb and two 120gb.
I've installed win11 from scratch via usb on all of them and also all
the software and configurations.
The reason why I installed two 120-128gb ssds in two of the mini-pcs
is because I didn't
have two 250-256gb available at the moment so I had to use what I had.
But, a couple of 250gb nvme ssds were ordered and they have now arrived.
So, my goal is to clone and/or make an image of the 120gb ssd so the
new 250gb ssd will take its place.
Windows 11 has bitlocker turned on as default in an armed/standby
state meaning that there is no password or key.
I have turned it off by entering the command: manage-bde -off c:
Took like 7min.
Is this possible to achieve somehow?
My thoughts are that it should be easiest to install the 250gb ssd in
the second nvme slot and then use the clone function?
But since the source disk is smaller, do I need to resize the
partition where windows are installed. Or will there be issues since
the install was based on the smaller disk and calculated their
partition sizes based on that?
My windows install with softwares and everything completely takes
about 60gb of the partition.
Windows default partitions.
If that will be successful with all the empty space being resized to
the main windows partition and i have a complete disk i want to make
an image of the whole disk so i easily can restore that if i want to
deploy more mini-pcs with same make and model in the future.
Its Asus PL64's
I hope you understand what my questions/goals are?
Grammar and explaining isn't the best.
/Anton
Yep I understood your question. You're trying to restore or clone your 120GB SSD to the new 250GB SSD.
Certainly in a Windows environment without BitLocker, this strategy is expected to work fine.
When Rescuezilla makes a restore to a larger disk, the partition layout is adjusted so that the final partition is stretched to fit within the extra space of the larger destination disk. Then after restoring the filesystem image to that final partition, there is a "grow filesystem" step that makes the filesystem within the final partition fit into the available space.
This two step process between the partition table restoration and the filesystem restoration (with a "grow filesystem" step) is due to the Matryoshka nesting dolls nature of how data is stored on disks.
This works fine for typical installations. But with BitLocker or other more complex filesystem layouts and filesystem encryption, the Matryoshka nesting doll has extra layers that current versions of Rescuezilla do not yet handle intelligently.
This simply means that while your clone or restore is expected to work fine, you may need to open GParted Partition Editor and manually grow the final partition into the any unused space at the end of the disk. The operation should take less than 1 minute.
I should mention that, out of conservatism, I often recommend booting into the operating system after a clone or restore before doing GParted Partition Editor operations -- just to make sure things are working correctly. But this reboot check is optional, and probably can be skipped in your case.
Once you've confirmed everything is resized as intended, you can take a fresh image and it will certainly be restorable to the same make and model in future without any manual steps.
Future versions of Rescuezilla will improve the Matryoshka nesting doll handling of more complex disks and with encryption. It's a situation closely associated with the 'restoring to smaller disk' problem, and will certainly require a complete overhaul of the internals of Rescuezilla to achieve, which I'm excited to work on!
Last edit: Rescuezilla 2024-08-17
Good!
So, i will check if I need the manual resizing step in gparted or not. But should be automatic you say? in most cases
I will try booting in to windows with new ssd in slot 1 and check if its correct. If everything went well. Do i want to save backup image of the whole disk or just all the partition? Might also re-run manage-bde -on c: i guess and let it encrypt? I might want to clone 2 more ssds from the new 250gig also before turning bitlocker on again.
Yes, it's automatic for most disks. I'm not sure the case for your passwordless BitLocker disk layout.
Whole disk backup image is what you want here.
If you encrypt the drive it's certain the resize operation won't work automatically.
Manually resizing the BitLocker encrypted disk may be a pain to do from Rescuezilla, even using GParted. But I'm not sure about that.
Whether you activate encryption before or after you've done your initial clone and resize is up to you. It makes sense to finish your cloning then manually activate encryption on each disk afterwards.
First attempt was a fail..
This caused source drive partitions corrupted and i needed to reclone the source disk from another machine with same hardware and windows install.
i think i know ehat caused the issues. When we disconnected the pc we didnt properly shut it down and windows is scheduled to a repair check as the error said also.
somhow the new 250g ssd were part of source disk so bios started from that disk..
strange.
attaching pic on of many errors.
That terrible source drive corruption issue is described here: https://github.com/rescuezilla/rescuezilla/issues/466#issuecomment-1913684546
I haven't been able to reproduce it locally, but your experiences suggest it's associated with the hibernation case which was my only possible understanding of what caused that problem because that's the only scenario where Rescuezilla modifies the source disk.
I will be removing the modification of the source disk logic
i recloned the drive from the other machine so now i have the new disk installed. but windows c drive is not the full drive now. i have 120gig unallocated space. how do i resize?
This is how partitions look.
Got everything worked out.
The automatic resizing did not work.
I needed to move the recovery partition behind the unallcolated space then apply.
Then boot into windows and expand c drive in disk manager. Done.
Everything works great.
Used latest 2.5-noble rescuezilla.
When i had a working 250gig install i cloned it to another 250g ssd to another machine.
I did not make an image of the full disk or the partitions.
I guess i can visit the site were the machines are installed and make a new clone/image from there. Just using a nvme ssd enclousre on the usb 3 port as destination.
All and all im happy with rescuezilla with its gui since clonezilla can be a little bit un user friendly.
It seemed that bitlocker wasnt enabled. Rescuezilla didnt argue. At least not with 2.5 version. It did with 2.4.
It says bitlocker on the c drive but in windows i can click "activate bitlocker"
Can you please try clone a smaller drive to a bigger and see if rescuezilla will resize partition?
Last edit: Orfeous 2024-08-26
Great you got everything up and running.
Yes I can, but the the current Rescuezilla expanding logic is simple and only looks at the final partition and would likely attempt to expand your recovery partition, which is not what you would want here. Ideally Rescuezilla will intelligently shift your last partition (the recovery partition) and then expand the filesystem, but this approach has not yet been implemented.
Great, until that low incidence but critical error that you just confirmed is associated with the hibernation handling is fixed please ensure you restart your Windows environment first.
Yeah, i did start windows before the cloning procedure. There was no sign of a checkdisk beeing scheudled, no signs of that. Though i now for a fact that the pc wasnt shutdown propertly since its a headless machine, no monitor, keyboard or mouse attached. We have those local on the site but this time that stuff was in another building and occupied by a colleague.
I did all this cloning operations at our office.
Im happy that i managed that little accident with rescuezilla corrupting the disk data.
I had a spare machine with exact same ssd and install/sytem so the data was easy to restore except i needed to rename the computer and change the windows activation key.
Please announce later when you have applied your bugfixes. I think this is a serious and critical bug that need attention.
Would be nice to have that auto resize feature. But it will work manually move and resize for now.
Can you please remind me again what i wanted. Image the whole disk or image just the partitions?
The image/s files will be quite big i guess? are there any compression?
Are there any network features available? i saw that i can mount a Samba share and store/restore files/images from there at least. Are there any PXE built in? For deploying to several machines?
I know we discussed Clonezilla lite/server and also FOG Project. And that RescueZilla didnt have that feature yet.
Thanks for the push. I have removed the usage of
ntfsfixon the source disk call for the upcoming version v2.5.1 to try and resolve issue #466. I haven't been able to reproduce the issue locally yet (a while ago I've spent several hours trying to reproduce it already), but hentfsfixcall during backup is the only possible the root cause.I will be spending this weekend thoroughly testing the new release, and aim to release v2.5.1 by next Tuesday.
Agreed, thanks for the feedback.
Your original question was about setting up 4 mini PCs with identical Windows environments. For this case all partitions is definitely what you want.
There is compression. By default it's
gzip, if you need better compression you can switch to eg,zstandardand use the slider to increase compression.Even without compression, only the used-space is copied. So 50GB of files on a 500GB disk produces an image that's around 50GB (a bit smaller with compression, maybe 40GB let's say).
The main network feature is using a Samba/SMB shared folder as the location the backup image is hosted for imaging (the 'backup' and 'restore' modes).
I haven't written any "official" PXE instructions, but several users have had positive experiences doing a network boot of Rescuezilla. See https://github.com/rescuezilla/rescuezilla/issues/117
Note: this PXE netboot of Rescuezilla still only provides non-headless operation, so you'll still need a mouse, keyboard and monitor attached. But at least it saves a USB stick.
Ahh yes, 6 months ago we discussed Clonezilla Lite/Server and FOG Project in this very detailed thread: https://sourceforge.net/p/rescuezilla/discussion/discussion/thread/228e4d058e/?limit=250#0cdc
This is a reminder for the v2.5.1 push for release :)
I was testing my v2.5.1 release candidate today that includes the removal of the
ntfsfixcall that modifies the source partition which appears to be the root cause of the critical bug.However, while testing for release today, I've come across a bug (#501) where under some circumstances an operation can continue in the background despite showing a summary page.
Because of this, I'm delaying the v2.5.1 release for (hopefully) 7 days from this message -- so I can fix that bug too.
Thank you for sharing!
I will be waiting. I have one of the mini pcs that i have to image then.
One of the pcs that i allready have installed a new 250g ssd in and cloned from one of the others i did :)
I was thinking of using the samba share and push the image to the NAS. Since the image file will be quite big. I wonder though whats happening with the free space on the ssd when you restore the backup image of the partitions? unavailable space? As it seems not to automatically resize the paritions and you are required to do it manually as i descibed above.
Rescuezilla v2.5.1 has now been released: https://github.com/rescuezilla/rescuezilla/releases/latest
Thank you so much! 👌💪
I will try it out!
Long time has passed, ive seen that 2.6 version has been released.
How have things working with the NTFS issues and partion autoresize?
Last time i had to manually resize and move and then resize/combine again
I'm waiting as well...I had to fall back to version 2.42 when I encountered the Single Partition problem on one pc running Ubuntu where the Backup would not begin...I know you corrected that in a build quite some time ago in 2.51 but you haven't released it since then. It's good though that you are holding it to sort out this service (operation) running issue. Hopefully that won't be too long.
On a side note I do agree with what someone wrote in another post that it would be good to bring on other devs who are interested in helping. I can understand you being protective of Rescuezilla but one person cannot be the sole person that is responsible for development and support. It appears progress for the past years (2020 to present) has been slow....Totally understandable for a person that still has to make a living (and doing this as a side activity)...Rescuezilla could become even more widely used than it is now but when a problem sits for six months or more before a new fixed release this is simply something that cannot be widely used until it has more support.
Not a criticism of you in any way. Just a fact that one person (No matter how capable) cannot do everything.
Tested the released 2.5.1 version from yesterday on three different machines... Ubuntu (Zorin) machine that previously had to use the 2.42 release to initiate a backup...A OpenMediaVault 7 NAS and a Windows 11 Pro system...Did backups and restores on all and all were successful.
Now if we could have the Image Explorer be able to not only display but be able to Save/Export files from an uncompressed backup and also a tick box to stipulate Verify an image automatically after it's created.