Hi Michael, Thank you very much for sharing this. It's nice to know Clonezilla rocks for you. As for the restoring image to smaller partition, well, that's really a different story because the imaging engine we have developed, Partclone, is a block-based program. It's not file-based. Therefore there is such a limitation. This is described here: http://drbl.org/faq/fine-print.php?path=./2_System/25_restore_larger_disk_to_smaller_one.faq#25_restore_larger_disk_to_smaller_one.faq
Steven. On 07/31/2015 08:31 PM, Michael Munger wrote: > Not sure where to post this, but I wanted to share the love for > Clonezilla as well as post a mini-howto where Googler's can find it. > > After replacing a motherboard, my Debian 8 box would not boot. This is > my primary workstation for development, sysadmin stuff, etc... so this > was a big deal. The motherboard had to be replaced because it was new > (from Amazon), but right out of the box, one of the memory slots was > bad. Amazon didn't have anymore stock, so I had to wait... they give you > 30 days, and long story short, I had to buy a replacement locally at the > last minute to ensure I was able to return the bad board to Amazon. > > I powered down via a normal shutdown, swapped the new Asus Sabertooth > X99 for the old one, put everything back together, and powered on. > > It wouldn't boot. Of course, I wasted a lot of time unsure about whether > or not this was a motherboard problem or a system problem. Since the > system had been working fine to that point, I wasted several hours > screwing around with secure boot and other options before finally > deciding it was probably the OS. > > Repairing the EFI / boot partition failed. Grub was dead. Nothing > worked. Enter Clonezilla. > > I decided to clone /dev/sda2, my root partition, as a backup, and > re-install. I figured: "I should be able to re-install, then restore > that partition to the root, and get everything back." > > I cloned /dev/sda2 without issue to two places: a spare internal drive > and an external drive (just in case), then reinstalled Debian 8.1. > > Once it was up and booting, I tried to restore /dev/sda2 from the > backup, but the new installation of the OS was 10GB too small, and > Clonezilla didn't want to do the restore (Frustrating - Steven, why is > that? Old versions of Ghost would let you size / re-size the restore. > Why doesn't CZ? ). > > I powered down, and booted up with a live ISO on USB (Debian 8.1 Live), > fired up gparted, and looked at the partition table. I decided I could > steal 10GB from the swap partition. So, I delete the swap partition and > the root partition, then added them back in with the correct size. (When > CZ complained that the root file system partition was too small, it gave > me the exact size it "used to be", which was very helpful here). Then, I > created a swap partition with the remaining space. > > Now, restoring /dev/sda2 worked without issue. But we still weren't > home-free. The restore worked, and the system booted, but it immediately > went into emergency mode because "Dependency failed for local file > system" - among other things. > > I figured it couldn't find the swap partition since I killed the one > created at install time. > > So, via rescue mode, I checked /etc/fstab and compaired the UUIDs there > with blkid, and sure enough (as I suspected) the swap partition UUID was > different since I had stolen space from the originally installed one. > When I deleted it and created a new one, it got a new UUID (as it should > have). So, I just changed the UUID value for the swap partition, saved, > and rebooted. > > The system came up without issue, and 5 minutes later, I was writing > this email to thank Steven for Clonezilla and put this out there for > anyone else Googling around on how to fix a broken system. -- Steven Shiau <steven _at_ stevenshiau org> Public Key Server PGP Key ID: 4096R/47CF935C Fingerprint: 0240 1FEB 695D 7112 62F0 8796 11C1 12DA 47CF 935C ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Clonezilla-live mailing list Clonezilla-live@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/clonezilla-live
