Clonezilla

This weekend I replaced my 120 GB OCZ Agility 3 SSD drive with a new 250 GB Samsung EVO 840 series SSD. I was running out of space and got bored of having to use my external drive so often.

For the transfer I used for the first time Clonezilla. I downloaded the ISO, and put it on an usb stick using Universal USB installer. Steps: boot from usb flash drive with Clonezilla  (if it asks for login use credentials user/live and run sudo clonezilla but it should not ask and go strait to a text based menu); I used disk- image and saved an image of the current disk to the external usb, reboot after replacing the internal drive with the new one, select again disk-image but this time restore, select the image you want to restore and the new drive as destination. My machine booted without any issues after this using the new drive.

Replacing the drive in my wife's laptop with the Agility 3 SSD required some more work because the source disk was larger than the destination SSD. I had to use first Gparted live which is another open source tool, again put it on the usb flash, boot and shrink the partition to a size smaller than the destination disk. Then I repeated the Clonezilla operation and saved the image to a n external usb drive. Then another trick is required to do the restore, advanced mode and -icds option so it does not check the size of the destination disk. The restore worked fine, Windows needed a boot to repair environment but after that it worked fine.

Clonezilla supports lots of deployment modes, it works well with network deployments and it has been used recently by my colleagues to deploy a large Citrix farm. I am impressed how useful these open source tools have become and hope that this type of projects will gradually replace proprietary systems.