On 03/24/2012 07:49 PM, [email protected] wrote:
> Thanks for your input Bill! Now that you mention it, there could easily
> be other explanations for what I'm experiencing. For example, remember
> what I said about Windows 7 dividing the hard drive into 2 partitions?
> If you do an installation of Windows 7 on an empty hard drive (without
> multi booting), it will by default create 2 partitions: the first one is
> the boot partition (about 100 MB) and the second one takes up the rest
> of your drive.
>
> When you said the partitions could actually be LARGER than the source
> partitions, that got my attention. It is possible that my guess about
> the smaller partition being exactly 100 MiB was wrong. The only reason I
> tried to create partitions that were exactly the same size is that
> Steven's document said the file geometry had to match exactly. If I
> still have time, I will make partitions on the destination drive that
> are slightly larger than the partitions on the source drive, then see if
> files still get corrupted.
>
> There could also be a number of other problems that I don't know about
> (but others might). Given all the problems I've been having, I'm quite
> impressed that you have the courage to actually use the source drive's
> image. To be honest it would be much easier to simply do a clean install
> of Windows! All this testing has set my work back by a week.
I still have not read that document by Stephen (will try to look at it
soon), so I'm not sure about the "geometry" statement. That word is
normally used in the context of "disk geometry": cylinders, heads,
sector size, etc. This becomes critical when creating partitions.
i.e., a disk partitioning program such as gparted "knows" what the disk
geometry is, and uses that when creating the partitions and the
partition table. In my mind, the only relevance of this to clonezilla
is when using the "disk" cloning instead of "parts" cloning. I hope
that Stephen will correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that when you
restore to a drive using an image that was a *disk* image, it is best to
use an identical drive. I believe that it may still work on a different
drive but it would possibly be forcing a disk geometry to that drive
which might not be its "natural" drive geometry.
So, if you are dealing with a "parts" image, you can restore to ANY
drive that has sufficient space, as long as you first manually create
the necessary partitions using gparted or similar program. This way you
will be honoring the actual native drive geometry for the target drive.
I don't think that the clonezilla "parts" image really cares then
about drive geometry. It will simply restore to the partitions that you
created before starting the restoration process.
Does that make sense?
In my department, we most often use "parts" images for this reason.
However, we do have a lot of Dell computers that have the same 320GB
hard drives, so we sometimes use "disk" images for those, assuming that
we would be replacing a bad drive with the same make/model 320GB drive
(replacement from Dell warranty perhaps?).
-Bill-
---------------------------------------------
Bill Gurley, Technical Director
Department of Chemistry
Univ. of Tennessee, Knoxville
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