Clonezilla

Nik-Ken-Bah

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Just had a look at the so called free back-up prog's for use with vindows and they ain't free come with a price tag after 30 days.
I also looked at Clonezilla which is Linux dependent only.
My Questionis:
Can I use it to clone a windows HD.
Quite a few of you know that I will be ditching windows but the HD it sits on is slowly dying and tonight whilst on the net everything slowed down and made life difficult so I intend to clone the other HD that is installed on my computer (a brand newie one) with vindows till I get my other hassle worked out. Then it will be bye bye vindows and I also intend to get the missus a brand new laptop as birthday pressie with Ubuntu on it.
 


This is free and should work with any drive and Major Geeks is a reliable source.



FWIW
 
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My Questionis:
Can I use it to clone a windows HD.
Yes, absolutely.


I will be ditching windows but the HD it sits on is slowly dying and tonight whilst on the net everything slowed down and made life difficult
Do you think the dying drive is healthy enough to sustain an intensive operation like Clonezilla? And just to be clear on your goal here... do you mean a true disk-to-disk clone, or do you mean to save a disk image of the old drive to preserve it's contents? I suspect you want to make a backup image of the dying drive so that you can restore from it later. A true clone will erase the destination drive.

Sometimes Clonezilla is not the best tool either... it really depends on what you need to preserve. A big question is, "Do you really need to save WIndows itself?" That is, "Do you want to restore this same exact old Windows at a later date?" Often this is not really the desired goal... it is only to preserve documents and photos.

With a fragile dying drive, and if Windows and other programs will not be needed, I would manually copy just the desired data, only a little at a time, and rebuild my own copy on USB if there's room, or copy from USB to other hard drive storage if more space is needed. One big copy operation, like the entire My Documents folder, might fail with a fragile drive... leaving you to either start over, or to try to sort out what you have and don't have... that's why I would work with smaller chunks. You might need to keep notes, or delete as you go after a successful copy. I would not "move" the data either for fear of failures... I would manually copy, then delete myself.

Cheers
 
I would not "move" the data either for fear of failures... I would manually copy, then delete myself.
Actually I do have another USB stick with Win 7 ultimate on it but I have no desire to go through the rigmarole of installing it and setting everything else up that goes with it,
Whilst by cloning I have a little hassle and everything should be as I shifted it.
I was going to clone the disk using Linux as the platform since it sees and can mount the disc unlike vindows, it don't wanna know about the Linux HD and doesn't show it in the computer panel only the external Seagate HD.
Last Night I actually suffered the blue screen of death. :eek::eek:
The disc I am going to clone is suffering old age going by the self test and also has 987 bad sectors but since it is lightly loaded that is acceptable.
After that occurrence I had to disconnect the HD as Mint run into an error whilst booting up and that was from both its HD and from a USB stick.
 
Actually I do have another USB stick with Win 7 ultimate on it but I have no desire to go through the rigmarole of installing it and setting everything else up that goes with it
I think that all versions of Win 7 reach End Of Life (EOL) in January, meaning updates and support from Microsoft will end. Corporations (and maybe individual users) may be able to extend the support for awhile longer, but it will cost money for a subscription. It's not like you need to give it up immediately at EOL, but it really is a good idea to make plans to retire any Windows 7 system you have, or at least isolate it from the internet.

I'm still not clear on what your path to "cloning" is, but I would again just caution that cloning will erase the destination drive. If that is your dual-boot Win/Linux drive... I think you'd lose them both. I've used Clonezilla before, but not lately. You definitely want to make sure you know what it will do, and what it's limitations are. Clonezilla is usually run from a CD/DVD or USB... for one reason, because the source drive must be unmounted.
 
If that is your dual-boot Win/Linux drive... I think you'd lose them bot
That is no problem there two separate HDD's and the UEFI handles the booting and it is set for Linux to boot as the first option. I just hit F11 to access the drives and select the vindows HD and it boots up.

Yeah I had a good squizz at Clonezilla and said stuff it. I have an idea I am working on and make may that option a moot point. :D:D Find out on the morrow.
 
That is no problem there two separate HDD's and the UEFI handles the booting
That's right... I forget these things. o_O:D

But, isn't that Windows drive the one that is working correctly with your ISP? And maybe the old dying drive connects okay too, but I'm just double-checking on that. I sure don't want you to lose that internet connection, and especially since you may need to look at those settings more in order to help get your Linux configured to finally work with your ISP.
 
But, isn't that Windows drive the one that is working correctly with your ISP
Yes! It is. That is why I have the ISO for Win 7 as I know it very well now and in preference to Win 8 or 10.
 
This is free and should work with any drive and Major Geeks is a reliable source.



FWIW
A word for the wary (or wise?) - I've had Acronis True Image fail on me - twice! I even had the paid for "Premium" edition.
Clonezilla has never failed me. :)
P.S. I think Acronis is using a customized Linux.
 
I remember......back in the dark times of using 'vindows'.......I used macrium for backups

I eventually blew it away as well.....never wish to see a 'vindow' again...or anything closely associated with it.

EaseUS backup was also quite good

As always, read the reasons it is free....free always comes with a price
 
Well I found out why you have to install vindows before installing Linux!
It is because when you install Linux it also installs the grub boot loader and even when you have not even got a Linux HD connected it still interferes with loading anything.
Spent three hours to-day because I thought vindows had sh*t itself completely so I thought I would load the other good HD I have installed on the computer but normally not running due to a shortage of power plugs of which there are four but because the DVD is also a Sata device it needs a sata power plug but the spare one on that power cable is too short to plug in to a HD. So I disconnected the Toshiba HD and rearranged the power plugs and but left the sata plug off the Mint HD, when I went to install vindows on the drive bloody grub sticks its nose in and says it didn't recognise the usb and also it doesn't recognise the empty HD as well.
This tells me that Grub is loaded into EUFI.
I reset everything back to the way I have things set-up and for the heck of it thought I would give vindows another go and it decided to load this time and here I am otherwise I would be doing other things to-night as I would have no internet access.
Plurry # O&Y&^TY^%R%T^%R^%$E$#W$W$W$ computer o_O:eek::eek::eek::eek:
 
OOPS ... we could have told you that.

(humming "Lean on Me" by Bill Withers ... I might feature that in Rock Roxx)

Wiz

Spent three hours to-day because I thought vindows had sh*t itself completely so I thought I would load the other good HD I have installed on the computer but normally not running due to a shortage of power plugs of which there are four but because the DVD is also a Sata device it needs a sata power plug but the spare one on that power cable is too short to plug in to a HD.

Geez I'd like to hear you say that sentence in one breath. :)
 
Geez I'd like to hear you say that sentence in one breath.
Yeah! I know I could have used a little more punctuation, that's what you get when you frustrated and a little tired.
But you learn a lesson better when you experience it for yourself. :p :D:D
 
Well I found out why you have to install vindows before installing Linux!
It is because when you install Linux it also installs the grub boot loader and even when you have not even got a Linux HD connected it still interferes with loading anything.
Spent three hours to-day because I thought vindows had sh*t itself completely so I thought I would load the other good HD I have installed on the computer but normally not running due to a shortage of power plugs of which there are four but because the DVD is also a Sata device it needs a sata power plug but the spare one on that power cable is too short to plug in to a HD. So I disconnected the Toshiba HD and rearranged the power plugs and but left the sata plug off the Mint HD, when I went to install vindows on the drive bloody grub sticks its nose in and says it didn't recognise the usb and also it doesn't recognise the empty HD as well.
This tells me that Grub is loaded into EUFI.
I reset everything back to the way I have things set-up and for the heck of it thought I would give vindows another go and it decided to load this time and here I am otherwise I would be doing other things to-night as I would have no internet access.
Plurry # O&Y&^TY^%R%T^%R^%$E$#W$W$W$ computer o_O:eek::eek::eek::eek:
I like to run two hard drives in my desktop computer . One for installing Linux - the other for the Windows install. I tell GRUB to install on the Linux hard drive only. Windows gets to keep it's boot loader just the way it likes it. It's quite fussy about it. Sometimes I will even unplug the Windows drive so there can be no mistake and no writing to the Windows boot sector. After installing Linux and GRUB I plug the Windows hard drive back in and run grub update. Grub finds the Windows install and boots it just fine.
 

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